The second half of the video is what I processed with LRTimelapse and you can see some terrible banding in the sky as it progresses from day to night. Well, you can see it in the original as well but the flickering takes your attention off the banding

Is there a secret to avoiding this? Did my color/exposure edits in Lightroom cause the issue? Would the Lightroom export have less banding than the LRT export?

https://youtu.be/vWX9WUQ3PxY

This was my first test of the Arsenal device using it's Holy Grail AI ramping technology and while it did a good job at ramping the settings I feel it did a terrible job at choosing the settings for a proper exposure. My next test I will utilize the device's EV settings where I can dial down the overall exposure to what I feel is correct.

And, yeah, it's terribly shaky. It's NEVER windy here in Phoenix so I brought my lightweight travel tripod on the hike to this location. It almost got knocked over several times so I stood there for 2 hours holding it in place. But, this was a test for the Arsenal device and I learned plenty about it.

Thanks,

Mike

Banding comes from compression. Especially if there are areas where a lot is going on (like the ground) and areas where only little happens (smooth sky), encoders will put their bandwidth to the areas where a lot goes on.
So shooting with the correct exposure will avoid noise for example and allow for more bandwidth in the sky.
Another approach would be to add a bit of grain to the whole image, to "break up" the smooth areas in the sky and force the encoder to put bandwith there.

Off course, every part of the workflow can affect image quality. If you use TIFF intermediaries from Lightroom, then render in Prores bring that to a good NLE make your video and render with 80mpbs H.264 or H.265 before uploading to Youtube, you will usually not have any banding.

We already discussed this many times, use the search feature for "banding".

All in all: I'd recommend to get the shooting right first and then, if you have a really good sequence and still get banding, take care of it.