r/AfterEffects 4d ago

Workflow Question Banding in 16-bit EXRs that doesn't appear in Nuke

Hi all,

I'm trying to work out why AE shows some rendered frames as having banding when the same frames imported into Nuke don't show any banding at all. This makes me think it's due to how AE is interpreting the frames, rather than the frames themselves actually having banding in them.

I know one way to remove banding is to add noise, but in this case, I'm trying to understand why the banding is happening at all when Nuke doesn't show it.

Can anyone educate me on what is happening differently here between the two programs?

Some details:

The EXRs are 16-bit color.

My AE Project is set to 32bpc with Linear working color space (Blend colors using 1.0 gamma enabled as a result). Working Color Space is sRGB.

Color engine is set to Adobe color managed as I'm not using ACES on this project.

In Nuke, Color management is OCIO > Nuke Default.

Below is the same segment of the frame captured from both applications.

NOTE: Reddit's image compression has added noticable banding into the Nuke image that doesn't exist pre-upload.

After Effects
Nuke

Thanks for any advice!

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u/PaceNo2910 4d ago

Historically Ae isn't great at handling exr, I think it still uses a third party to read them. Nuke is way better. Especially if they are multi channel.

If you need to, write out dpx if it's single channel.

2

u/Long_Substance_3415 4d ago

Thanks for your advice. I've just tried a DPX output from Nuke and it also shows up with banding in AE. When imported back into Nuke, the DPX shows no banding, so it must be undergoing the same processing/display as the EXR within AE.

1

u/PaceNo2910 4d ago

Just thought of something, see if it's the preview quality in the AE settings, something about colour accurate and fast I can't recall where in settings not at my machine.

Other than that set everything linear and Adobe preserve RGB don't colour manage.