Banding?

[Songbird21]

I'm having a problem I never noticed before (It may be because I have an LCD monitor now). I'm getting an odd artifact in my footage which I found out may be banding (The "waveyness" to the darker parts). If it is banding how do I fix it? And I need to know the answer fast because I have 3 weeks to finish my AMV for Anime Boston.

[mirkosp]

That banding looks like it might have been introduced by bad filtering beforehand. Care to share your filterchain? If it was in the source, then you can fix it by using gradfunkmirror or gradfun2dbmod (mod is stronger and will easily kill detail, though, so I'd suggest using funkmirror), which should both come with the latest AMVApp. An explanation on gradfun2dbmod's usage can be found here, but, again, be advised that it can quite easily kill detail, so you should first try to use gradfunkmirror if you really need to deband.
However, in case the banding was introduced by the encode, then rather than filtering, you should update your zarxgui (you can get the latest here) and try increasing the aq-strength in the advanced tab.

[Songbird21]

I found a filter that works to fix the problem. Thank you for your reply

[Mister Hatt]

Somewhat not the answer you wanted, but often anime is drawn with swathe colouring, which looks like irregular banding. Maybe my LCD sucks here (it's a shitty one until my U2711 is back) but that looks intentional, and probably better than being smooth seeing as the frame has almost no detail anywya, probably caused by your filtering in the first place.

[mirkosp]

No, that screenshot has some clear banding that was hardly intended...

[TheRyuu]

gradfun2dbmod()

Also just keep an eye on how (if at all) you filtered it. Denoising/blurring can cause banding although sometimes this is unavoidable because of the source and what kind of filtering it may need, so dithering afterwards will help fix that (gradfun2dbmod (which adds grain in banding prone areas) or gradfunkmirror (which just debands, but the result may not be kept as well as the encoder))