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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Banding and artefacts on YOUTUBE

Kim Frank

Kim Frank

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Yes it's abot youtube again, I'm sory :)

I'm on Windows 7 using Adobe and material shot on Red MX and Scarlet.

Normally everything for me was fine using an uncompressed file encoding it to H264 mp4 out of Media Encoder and uploading. Everything looked fine. But recently I've shot some Low light stuff, and will continue for my next project. All these projects will get their main distribution through youtube, so my desire is to let it look as good as possible. But it looks like shit. Somehow youtube isn't able to handle the Lowlight and reacts with banding and compression artefacts.

Here you can take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2w4kIpjeak&feature=youtu.be

This is an upload from a H264 compressed file at a bit rate of 40. The thing is, even this file I uploaded has slight compression artefacts and banding. The original uncompressed render of cause looks flawless!

What I've already tried is:

- rendering visible noise on the footage. That helped my first H264 encoding a lot, but youtube distroyed it again. You can see a test here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqQSm2sdH4
And of cause I originally didn't want to end up with noisy footage.

- Rendered to DNxHD, but youtube only excepts this in 8 bit and with 8 bit the original file ended up with slight banding, that youtube made just as worse, as the H264 Version.

- Cranked up the H264 encoding to 5.1 and 50mps. This didn't help, but by setting the keyframe distance to 1 the result was perfect. (I also tried setting the keyframe distance to 25 what again resultet in slight banding.) But even with the keyframe to 1 File, that looks flawless youtube added banding and artefacts. You can see a test here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVONX_sqymE

I know that this is because of the gradients and that the colours are not seperatet enough, but that's the look I'm after. And I can assure you that the uncompressed file looks perfect. Although I had in After Effects to add a slight amount of noise, nearly not visible to get rid of the banding even at 32 bit.

Is there anything I can do about that? Would a Prores render help a lot? I'm on PC so it would mean some trouble getting it encoded on a Mac. Or do I just have to live with it :(
 
The problem that you run into working in 32bit is that AE does not automatically apply dithering. If I'm planing to output to an 8bit final out of After Effects at the last stage of my comp I will add an Arithmetic effect. This is a very low process 8bit effect and will force AE to apply dithering to my comp. In tern It gets rid of the banding that is so prevalent with very fine gradients. In the link below you can see a piece that I put together that was all done in 16bit. But if I uploaded it to youtube no matter what I would get banding....until I forced AE to apply dithering. Now when viewed at 1080 or original quality there is no banding. I hope this helps. It took me sometime to figure it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMdvZ0S3SNk
 
Joseph Coleman said:
The problem that you run into working in 32bit is that AE does not automatically apply dithering. If I'm planing to output to an 8bit final out of After Effects at the last stage of my comp I will add an Arithmetic effect. This is a very low process 8bit effect and will force AE to apply dithering to my comp. In tern It gets rid of the banding that is so prevalent with very fine gradients. In the link below you can see a piece that I put together that was all done in 16bit. But if I uploaded it to youtube no matter what I would get banding....until I forced AE to apply dithering. Now when viewed at 1080 or original quality there is no banding. I hope this helps. It took me sometime to figure it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMdvZ0S3SNk
Click to expand...

I'm sorry Joseph, but on my monitor I'm seeing similar artefacts and banding like the one I'm talking about in your clip. I get what you saying, although I'm not sure what you mean with 'Arithmetic Effects' I guess the same I'm doing with adding noise. As I said, there ist no banding whatsoever in my uncompressed render.

I'm not sure, why we are seeing different things in your youtube video, but maybe my system just shows more of the atefacts. On my IPadfor example I can't see any of that banding and atefacts either in your or in my clips.

Great animation BTW
 
Try what exactly? Applying a arithmetic effect? Could you explain what you mean by that?
 
If your still in AE and working in 16 or 32 bit just apply an adjustment layer at the top of your layer stack and add an Arithmetic effect to that. Because its an 8bit effect, it will force Ae to apply dithering. Then render it out and upload to youtube to see if it helps at all. I'm assuming it will help a lot. My comp had terrible banding before I did this. Its not perfect but it will help a lot.

To be honest I'm just curious to see the results. I wan't to know if Ae applying dithering vs just adding noise gives a different result or not.
 
Last edited:
Upload your videos as ProRes LT! That way the only compression happens on YouTube side not yours. I got the same artifacts with my 4k uploads, but it became a non issue after doing ProRes.

Here is my latest youtube video i uploaded, and it was done at ProRes LT 3840x2160. Took about 10hours to load but the results are worth it.



Kim Frank said:
Yes it's abot youtube again, I'm sory :)

I'm on Windows 7 using Adobe and material shot on Red MX and Scarlet.

Normally everything for me was fine using an uncompressed file encoding it to H264 mp4 out of Media Encoder and uploading. Everything looked fine. But recently I've shot some Low light stuff, and will continue for my next project. All these projects will get their main distribution through youtube, so my desire is to let it look as good as possible. But it looks like shit. Somehow youtube isn't able to handle the Lowlight and reacts with banding and compression artefacts.

Here you can take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2w4kIpjeak&feature=youtu.be

This is an upload from a H264 compressed file at a bit rate of 40. The thing is, even this file I uploaded has slight compression artefacts and banding. The original uncompressed render of cause looks flawless!

What I've already tried is:

- rendering visible noise on the footage. That helped my first H264 encoding a lot, but youtube distroyed it again. You can see a test here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqQSm2sdH4
And of cause I originally didn't want to end up with noisy footage.

- Rendered to DNxHD, but youtube only excepts this in 8 bit and with 8 bit the original file ended up with slight banding, that youtube made just as worse, as the H264 Version.

- Cranked up the H264 encoding to 5.1 and 50mps. This didn't help, but by setting the keyframe distance to 1 the result was perfect. (I also tried setting the keyframe distance to 25 what again resultet in slight banding.) But even with the keyframe to 1 File, that looks flawless youtube added banding and artefacts. You can see a test here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVONX_sqymE

I know that this is because of the gradients and that the colours are not seperatet enough, but that's the look I'm after. And I can assure you that the uncompressed file looks perfect. Although I had in After Effects to add a slight amount of noise, nearly not visible to get rid of the banding even at 32 bit.

Is there anything I can do about that? Would a Prores render help a lot? I'm on PC so it would mean some trouble getting it encoded on a Mac. Or do I just have to live with it :(
Click to expand...
 
You need to round off the least significant bit....
That will do the same thing as dithering...

Basically a noise value set at .4% should be enough....mathematically
I sometimes up it to 1%....
 
Joseph: I tried using the Arithmetic Effect and it did the same as adding a slight noise. The banding, even at 32bit in AE disappeared but of cause without the downside of making the footage noisier. Thank you very much for the tip. BUT: As soon as I render out a H264 the banding is back again. Tried different ways. Rendering out an uncompressed AVI, then converting in AME. Putting the AVI in a new AE composition at 8bit then rendering to H264. And rendering to 8bit DNxHD. Always withe same result of banding. I don't quite understand that.

Paul: At the moment I'm looking at a calibrated DELL Ultrasharp. A fine computer monitor that I know quite well. Why are you asking? I mean you do see the banding in the YouTube clips? I'm not sure what this could have to do with my monitor calibration.

Jacob: Thank you for the tip. I read about it and would try it, but I have yet to find a way to transcode to Prores on windows. Do you know a way? Or I would need to ask a friend to transcode for me. But every time sending Hard drives round town, etc. I need an easier way if possible.

Again, thank you all so far
 
Thanks Mike, That's what I found as well, but a lot of comments stated that its not working, why I haven't tried it yet. Somewhere I read FFmpeg was able to do it. still googeling
 
I've found the best results come from manipulating individual video components before sending it to the compressor. I personally scrub the cB and cR channels clean of any noise and smooth them out as this helps with low bitrate video, and then use a static dither any extra banding in the Y channel only. This allows you to have a cleaner picture on Youtube becuase it is always a 4:2:0 medium.

Adding noise works if you don't switch resolutions, and have extra bitrate to spare, 2 things YouTube does not do well. I recommend against adding any extra moving noise as this degrade the sharpness of your image after the compression decides that it's detail it doesn't want to hold, and it's over your entire image instead of the problem areas.
 
Kim Frank said:
I'm not sure, why we are seeing different things in your youtube video, but maybe my system just shows more of the atefacts. On my IPadfor example I can't see any of that banding and atefacts either in your or in my clips.
Click to expand...

Kim Frank said:
I'm not sure what this could have to do with my monitor calibration.
Click to expand...

you tell me...
 
What you see is youtube, it will not be perfect, I guess we all have to wait for H.256 then things should improve to half the issues at the same weight. I thought your uploads looked decent the compression hits hard when you have so much of your frame close to black. Make sure your uncompressed 8 bit master is not having issues before uploading if it then becomes blocky you can ad noise but I think the compression still will be visible as you have som much close to black. Another trick is to pull the luminance curve at the bottom so you got bigger part of the frames as pitch black then the compression might leave the rest of your frame alone as it calculates on bytes per goop. Black cost you nothing so that is one way of cheating the compression codec to leave the parts of your frame that has colors alone.

But again, youtube is sadly youtube...
 
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