Well, whoever did the compression/conversion went too far on the processing. I'm pretty sure that the original image didn't have the sudden tonal changes that your picture shows. Somewhere down the chain from anime studio to your computer the image became posterized.topgamer101 wrote:No this video footage has not been touched by VirtualDub, I was just curious if there was an option to remove it. I suppose I'll need to teach myself to use Avisynth then.Willen wrote:That's Posterization (usually confused with Banding, which is very similar). The usual culprit is colorspace conversions where there are insufficient bits per color (16 bits versus 24 or 32 bits), especially on low quality sources. Another possible cause is over aggressive settings for sharpeners and other filters. Over filtering can definitely produce that effect.
I'm assuming that isn't only happening in VirtualDub's preview (which by default is set to display at 16 bits color depth for speed). VDub's preview will have no effect on the actual output unless you purposely lower the color depth of the actual video.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to eliminate or reduce posterization from a source that has it other than to blur it somewhat.
It's a tough thing to get rid of totally, short of editing the frames by hand and manually adding back the gradients to the colors. Blurring will at least blend the colors together a bit so the tonal changes aren't so abrupt.
I'm not sure if the people at www.doom9.org would have a better idea of what you can do to improve the images. It may be worthwhile to ask them there, though.
