ktaylor355 wrote:Thank you, that’s helpful. I need to do a better job with grading to help the process but seems it’s to be as expected.
You mentioned about “flat grading”, what would you recommend to better the grading, this was my first braw grade, so open to information
I am not judging your grading with this - I just described it as a "flat" look (non-contrasty and de-saturated colors) with lots of bokeh you went for and this creates all those soft going gradients which in turn result in banding. This means the 256 available steps are not enough to distinct from one step to the next.
You also have to be careful not to see banding in your footage which would in reality be a result of your monitor's restrictions (I've fallen for this too). But if the banding is real - then you only can fight it by either going 10-bit all the way or add more noise/grain until it gets masked over and can't be hidden through the encoding. Also do less denoising. It is a balancing act.
You also could try to upload a grained 10bit version to YT and see if this gives a better start for their encoding conversion.
If you have used a LUT for the final look, also try to set the LUT interpolation in your project settings to tethrahedral - because this uses higher precision math it might help with the skin tone thing. Could be an edge case.