This post was last modified: 2020-12-11, 06:12 by arsunik.

Having issues with banding/artifacts in the sky when exporting H264.  Issues go away when exporting as Prores but it's useless because I can't share prores files.

Timelapse info: Canon R5 shot RAW, Ap Priority
Export info: H264, 4k, 23.976, Color: 422, Gamut: BT709, +Sharpening
Exported the stills from Lightroom as TIFF, 16bit.

I've tried quality on high and very high.  I've tried adding motion blur, but even at 2, the lowest, it looks like too much. 

Any other suggestions?

Link to vid: https://youtu.be/C-Xsj2OzJjQ

Thanks

This post was last modified: 2020-12-11, 11:45 by Gunther.

Of course lossy encoders always have some limitations - especially they might create banding if areas are too smooth.
You could try to add some noise in Lightroom in order to prevent the encoder from smoothing everything. Also don't use motion blur then, because it will also smooth out the sequence, which might then be counter productive.

This is my general advice to fight banding. But in your case, the banding comes from the very fast camera movement (too fast in my opinion). This makes the encoder put all its bandwith to the bottom part where you have that fast changes in the ground, leaving no room for encodig in the sky part - which will then suffer from low quality / banding. This is how those lossy encoders work - they put their bandwith in areas with lots of details - rather smooth areas get rendered in low quality.

If you want my honest judgement: that sequence is not well done. The movement is way too fast and you have different movements in different directison - ground, stars, camera. This doesn't go well together. The banding is only a result from a that. With slower movement and less differrent movement directions, everything would look much more pleasing and the encoder would do a much better job.

Thanks for the info! Will try slower movement next time.