Exporting infographics - best settings?

Guys

am I missing something here.. Just exporting a 2 minute infographic animated text with a static background and when i export either h264, proxy codec etc the background seems pixelated with colours (see attached one the way its smooth and the other exported)

This looks like 'banding' because the bit-rate of the export codec (probably 8-bit) isn’t high enough to reproduce the gradually changing colours within such a subtle graduation. Sometimes it's best to just avoid these sort of graduations.

However if you want to keep the graphic you could try the following to fix the banding…. (This assumes you constructed the graphic within FCPX).

In FCPX select the graduated graphic and add the ‘ADD NOISE’ effect (in Effects > Stylize).

In the Inspector change ‘TYPE’ to ‘BLUE NOISE’ and as a starting point input a very low number such as .03 or .06 and set the opacity slider to about 70%

What you’re attempting to do is create enough noise to break up the banding without the noise becoming too noticeable. It’s a balance. You’ll probably need to experiment to get a result you like. You might find a bit of visible ‘grain’ in the graphic is quite OK if it kills the banding.

Try a couple of test renders into the codec you want to deliver (h.264 or whatever) and see what you get. Judge the result with the video playing in real time rather than stopped on a still frame. The noise is much less visible when the clip is playing.

Hope this helps

John

… another reason for banding is:
too high compression on INput

have a look, I rebuilt your gradient in Pixelmator:



looks smooth, doesn't it?
now export that as jpeg, insert to FCPX, export h.264...
even in jpg 100% quality no fun.
export as png - still banding!

so, I set in Pixelmator the graphic to 16bit, and export from FCPX as proRes:



(left jpg import, right 16bit png import)

Thanks Karsten

I tried adding the noise filter, h264 and it was definitely better.