Hi everyone, am having the following problem. Whether I render at H.264 or H.265 (NVIDIA GPU) I am getting these weird “stepwise” shading that you can hopefully see in the red box. Strangely they do not show up when I work in TD. I render at 4k. When I choose H.265 and I change the profile to Lossless it improves, but still exists. If I render H.264 in Lossless profile, it looks like it’s fixed, but I can’t play it back in any video player. Does anybody know a fix?
This phenomenon is called “banding” and it often shows when your compression codecs which use 8bits per color don’t have enough color shades available to show a perfect smooth gradient.
See some examples in computergames here: How to fix color banding with dithering | REASSEMBLY
So apart from rendering to 10 bit color as a solution (which would also require a 10 bit monitor), dithering your output (basically adding a tiny bit of noise) helps the best to reduce banding. By default the Render TOP applies dithering (see the advanced tab) , but in your case you can try more noise. See a nice example here: Shader Advanced - Color Banding and Dithering | GPU Shader Tutorial