Why dark video is a terrible mess

Dark scenes in television, YouTube, and streaming platforms all look pixelated and blocky. Here's why.

(you can find contact details and social links there too)

[TomScottGo]

I can promise there are no jump-scares in here. And yes, I finally got an animator to do in a couple of days what would have taken me a couple of weeks...!

[Loveandjoy]

He's really mastered how to present a topic, his 6 min video feels like a 2 min video

[Hotbusterer]

It looks even worse once you realise how dirty your screen is

[frailty]

0:42 no way this dude just sneakily taught us how greenscreening works entirely in the edit

[magalhaes]

I actually noticed that if I add noise to my RAW photographs I can reduce color banding, but never knew why

[Nugcon]

I bet people in the future will intentionally add banding as "2010's aesthetic"

[CadenButera]

“256 Shades of Green” is the boring spinoff of a franchise we never asked for

[jeffram]

Having worked with digital video as a hobby since the Video Toaster's introduction, I've understood this phenomenon for ages. Your explanation - with animations - taught me a few things I hadn't given much thought to. It also explains banding better than I could ever hope to. Brilliant video as always. Keep up the great work!

[masonlevine]

As a digital illustrator who has to combat color banding on digital art programs, thank you! I never knew this was a thing until you mentioned it, and it immediately clicked as the reason why my gradients always look a little...unblended.

[prabhakarrao]

I’ve finally found a video that explains what I’ve spent hours and hours explaining albeit rather poorly to friends of mine regarding banding. Thank you so much for putting this up on YouTube

[zacharyhaynes]

The reason I love good 4k restorations is because I hardly see these. Even back in the 2000s I noticed those brands in my blu rays on 1080p TVs. If you haven’t seen The Godfather, for instance, in 4K I highly recommend it. It’s never been more dark, shadowy and crisp since the theater.

[unfa]

I'm a graphic designer. Crying over color banding is my job.

[FrancSchiphorst]

The freaking level of detail in production, adding a bit of reverb when showing the movie theater.... Awesome!

[daqwid]

This always made me angry when it comes to windows wallpapers. The image preview looks fine, but when you set it as a wallpaper, windows compresses the image very heavily (even on PCs that have loads of RAM and graphic memory), and makes evey dark wallpaper look extremely bad. Not to mention Windows 10 and 11 does even worse job, and you can see compression on their stock wallpapers. All because Microsoft wants that stupid mobile market.

[Thinking-OutLoud]

"why doesn't the bright background have colourbanding?"
me, sobbing: IT DOES, RIGHT THERE, I CAN SEE IT

[gavtater]

After 3 years of searching and scouring forums for the reason my 4K television does this while I’m watching Netflix and Hulu, I finally get my answer from a recommendation on YouTube. I feel like I completed a long journey accidentally.

[WalrusFPGA]

Thanks for this easy-to-digest explanation of this phenomena. I deal with this kind of noise constantly in videos, and the inclusion of scanlines in those areas on top of the lower-bitrate they typically receive on top of the re-encoding by youtube to an already-compressed video, can make for some really weird visual anomalies that hopefully our codecs and hardware can get better at dealing with in the future.

[spiroplayzgaming]

you put chills down my spine in some parts

[josephkony]

"why its blocky in the dark"
me watching in 144p so my PC can run: huh

[jamesmccann]

I think we can assume that this wasn't done in one take, as Tom didn't celebrate at the end.