NextPreviousHomeFighting MP4/JPEG banding in gradients



michiel | 3 years ago | 3 comments | 3 likes | 1,249 views

Alex-Raymond T., liuyongcai and Ulli like this!

It has been mentioned earlier in this community: MP4 and JPEG/JPG can't handle simple colour gradients. Your plasma layer gradients look perfect in BluffTitler, but when exported as a JPG picture or an MP4 video they look horrible: ugly banding effects appear.

There are 2 ways to remove the banding:

COMPRESSION

Reducing compression (using a higher bitrate) helps. This is however not always possible when a 3rd party, like YouTube, manages the compression.

NOISE

The other fix is adding noise. In BluffTitler, apply the Filters\Noise effect to the plasma layer. Play with the FX NOISE prop until the banding is gone.


In this JPG screenshot, the left half uses an FX NOISE value of 0: banding is clearly visible.

The right half uses an FX NOISE value of 0.15: banding still happens, but is much less visible.

It's counter intuitive that you have to add noise to smooth the result, but it's necessary to workaround this annoying MP4/JPEG artifact.




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Note that banding does not happen with lossless formats like PNG and uncompressed AVI.

michiel, 3 years ago


Merci Michiel pour ces précisions.

PAT67, 3 years ago


You had already told me about it and it's good to know, especially for exports to YT.
Thanks Michiel.

Alex-Raymond T., 3 years ago


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About michiel

Michiel den Outer is the founder and lead coder of Outerspace Software. He lives in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

If he isn't busy improving BluffTitler, he is playing the piano or rides the Dutch dikes on his bikes.

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Contact michiel by using the comment form on this page or at info@outerspace-software.com