I initially thought this was some sort of banding?

[Akai-Shuichi]

In the hair on the left-side of the image: https://forum.videohelp.com/images/imgfiles/Rwg52L0.png
Around the text: https://forum.videohelp.com/images/imgfiles/aIc7PIK.png

I initially thought this was some sort of banding, but am unsure... is it maybe some sort of blocking or what?

Also another question I have is do you typically find banding on older grainy sources? I don't seem to notice it as much as I do on more recent digital stuff.

Thanks

[raffriff42]

Too much noise reduction might create the effect you are talking about.
Or less likely, extreme color correction.

(bottom half gamma=2.6, to exaggerate effect)
Is the pattern static, or slowly changing, or rapidly changing frame by frame?

Question 2 - Grain, like dither, can hide banding. Sometimes grain is good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_banding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

[Akai-Shuichi]

I'd say it is changing slowly frame by frame. That's how it is on the source (for both).

[redwudz]

Akai-Shuichi, in the future please use a more descriptive subject title in your posts to allow others to search for similar topics. I will change yours this time. From our rules:

Try to choose a subject that describes your topic.
Please do not use topic subjects like Help me!!! or Problems.

Thanks,

Moderator redwudz

[raffriff42]

Too much temporal denoising probably. To fix it, I think I would add a bit of grain, but someone here may have a better idea.

[jagabo]

Keep in mind that the 16 million 8 bit RGB colors map to only about 2.5 million 8 bit limited range YUV colors. So you can easily see gradients in YUV video if there is no noise to mask it.

[pandy]

Coarse quantization - codecs usually allocating lower amount of bits for dark areas - sometimes is better to perform or good denoising (NLM is OK) or even applying coring.