I would be interested to learn what Compressor settings people are using to create 1080p H.264 movies? I have found that I typically need to crank the bit rate above 25mbs (high for a compressed movie) to address blue-banding issues. Every now and then I stumble across someone elses high grade film compressed in H.264 that is very clean and surprisingly small for the quality it provides. Though I am generally happy with most of my compressions, recently I have had some not so good results.
Would love to hear what folks are doing.
Shawn
Best cheat is to grade the blues to a narrower color range. If you have bottomless blues (deep blue water shots etc), boost levels to attempt to blend the 2. It's easier if you show the examples of the good and bad so recommendations can be made for the specific problem.
Good idea Drew. The FCP export is not banded but the compressed version is. It looks like the range is too much for the compression. I will give that a try. More to follow...
