Getting odd distortions and banding on dark backgrounds in after effects

Question

Hi everyone

I recently filmed an ad for aperol and am trying to ad some motion graphics to it in AE. While the footage looks clean and renders clean in premiere pro, as soon as I drop the premiere pro sequence into AE, dark circles start to appear on the homogenous gray backdrop. It doesnt go away when i render it.

So far ive also tried render the raw premiere pro clip in AVI and import it into AE like that but the same thing happened.

I also tried different codecs and nothing changed.

Thanks for reading.

I hope someone knows whats going on

Cheers

Szalam · Accepted Answer

That issue is called banding and it can happen with fine gradients in limited color spaces.

Did you try rendering out of Premiere Pro to see if that banding appears in a render from there?

What color space is your AE proejct set to? (8, I'm guessing?) Try 32 and see if the banding goes away.

Add some noise in AE to not only combat the banding you're seeing in AE, but also to help MP4 compression not add its own banding.

Many ways to add noise. I usually use Renoiser from Red Giant's Magic Bullet Suite - either on its own or as part of color grading with Magic Bullet Looks - because it's a more film-correct kind of grain where shadows and highlights are treated differently and such. But you can also do it in AE a number of ways. I used to just apply a Noise effect at 100% amount to a 50% grey solid and then drop its opacity down to 2-6% (depending on how much banding I was needing to fight).

Rick Gerard · Answer

When you compress for MP4 you are stuck with 8-bit color compressed in blocks of 4 pixels. There is no way around that. To hide the banding that will appear in subtle color changes you need to add just a little bit of noise. This keeps the color compression + the 8-bit color depth from causing as many problems. Check the color value change over the distance from the brightest area to the edge of the straw. There are only 13 steps, divide that by the 4-pixel average and you are going to get four or five bands of compressed color unless you add a little noise to the background when you render an 8-Bit H.264 file. It's not as bad as it was when broadcast TV required us to clip the color range even further.

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