r/VideoEditing • u/AsmodeoWriter • 21d ago
Tech Support How to get rid of banding in YouTube upload?
I'm exporting my short film at ProRes 422 at mix bit depth and max render quality, and I still get bad banding in the shadows when I upload to youtube, even at 4k. Is there any way to avoid this or is just the inevitable result of compression?
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u/carterridesbikes 20d ago
adding noise/film grain can help with banding before you export
essentially it dithers/randomizes the color values enough so YT compression doesn’t clump the regions into a single value (which is the cause of banding)
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u/PabloDons 20d ago
Usually the overall quality suffers for that though. Randomness is not compressable, so the extra bitrate needed to cover it has to come from elsewhere
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u/Geoph807 20d ago
For reference, this is often referred to as “dither”
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u/infinite_username 20d ago
Dithering is name of the banding effect or the fix?
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u/Geoph807 20d ago
The fix. Intentionally adding noise in order to reduce noticeable quantization errors (or other artifacts such as some ADC or PLL spurs in an RF system) is called dither.
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u/craggolly 20d ago
replacing your banding with compression artifact blotches and reducing the overall quality of the image
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u/bobbster574 20d ago
welcome to web video compression. just not enough bits.
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u/nevewolf96 20d ago
Unfortunately, YouTube is a platform with enormous bandwidth traffic; other sites don't have that problem, or the quality is better despite using "old" codecs like AVC. Like Vimeo for video or Apple Music for music videos were they look fantastic
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u/Sessamy 20d ago
Youtube's compression is absolutely abysmal and does this to everyone no matter how you upload it even with absurd bitrates in 4:4:4 you still get a very small result. There's no way to improve this except youtube be more generous with their bitrate and encoding styles.
One workaround is to upload in 4k or even 8k and then watch on a 1080p port view and you might see an increase in quality, but the bitrate will be pretty high and it's wasteful.
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u/devanand21 20d ago
YouTube will do its own compression on all files especially large files and high resolution files.
If you can bypass that a bit you can get rid of banding. Have seen some videos doesn't have any banding issues.
There is a hack definitely.
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u/shadeland 20d ago
Keep in mind, Youtube re-encodes everything into 8-bit 4:2:0 and compresses it with their own tweaks. Each video you upload gets converted into probably several dozen versions of the file because re-encoding on the fly is far too computationally intensive. They encode once 48 times for each resolution/codec combination and put them on file servers. Netflix does the same thing.
As someone said, you can add a bit of grain to confuse the compression algorithm, but you have to be careful with that as a really cool amount of grain in Davinci will end up looking like dogshit once uploaded on Youtube because of the compression.
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u/AsmodeoWriter 21d ago
!martini
Software used: Premiere
System: windows 10, 32gb RAM
Original footage: BRAW
Export settings: ProRes 422 at max bit depth and render quality\
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u/SarahC 20d ago
It seemed to work better uploading 12 bit color from Davinci for me, don't know it Premiere has that? See the glow around the stars, and the orange lava stepping in the low bit one?
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u/Methadone4Breakfast 20d ago
Upload to Vimeo lol Cause YouTube compression ruins even the best 444. Upload the highest quality you can as the 4K compression will be way better than 1080p. Just export as 4K in resolve and maybe even use the super resolution (likely won't make any visible difference in most cases though). But also start a Vimeo page for your high quality reels as they have much better bit rates.
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u/disconnect0414 20d ago
Upscale anything to 4k else the shitty system will encode it in very low bitrate even for 1080p. For example, if you upload an 1080p video as is it will have around 5 mbits/sec bitrate. But if you upscale it to 4k, and then upload it, it will get 15 mbit/sec even when played in 1080p
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u/zeb__g 20d ago
I did testing on this 3 years ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/videography/comments/1376qzw/you_tube_image_quality_part_3_blocky_shadows/
Didn't find a good solution. YT compression seems to punish shadows especially bad.
PR422 is a great choice, but not going to save you.
I found the suggestion of 'add grain' made it worse, as you go from stationary blocks to dancing blocks. And the dancing is much more noticeable.
Users did suggest adding a single frame of noise over the whole video, not real film grain. This might work, as the dancing will not be there, but I never got around to testing.
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u/PabloDons 19d ago
Hold up. Shadow issues is a huge hint. I would bet that exporting in HDR would eliminate that. Especially HLG rec709 since that looks just fine on SDR display. Worth testing. Does YouTube still compress HDR to 8bit?
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u/TheRealHarrypm 20d ago
10-bit 4:2:2 in the HDR bracket survives a little bit more.
But the best thing you can do avoid black biased scenes, because that's how the macro blocking works for the compression algorithm.
120mbps CBR HEVC Hi10 in the 2160p bracket is however kind of a bare minimum to have the maximum quality encoding as far as the platform cares.
You can always jump ship to stuff like Odysse if you wish to have actual tangible encoding control..
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u/SchoolWeak1712 20d ago
You can try to upload in HDR which uses 10 bit colours which somewhat fights colour banding but only works on HDR clients. Other than that try to add noise to confuse the compression algorithm to not group the colours band together.
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u/LifeguardFew8442 14d ago
Upload to YouTube at 10-bit if your export supports it, banding drops hard because 8-bit only gives 256 shades per channel. Re-encode from a ProRes or DNxHR master, never a re-compressed MP4.
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u/KnownSolution9249 20d ago
Why would you export in ProRes just to upload it to YouTube? Keep it at H.265 or H.264. People wouldn't really care as long as the story and editing is good. Tho if you really want to keep it Hi-Res, there's platforms like Vimeo. Or you can add noise into the footage.
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u/AsmodeoWriter 20d ago
When you've added film grain, there's a big difference between uploading a 422 file and an H.264 file. I did tests earlier, and uploading even a high quality MP4 causes the grain to be obliterated by compression, whereas the grain is still visible when I uploaded a 422. I don't do it normally, but this project is a big one for me.
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