Why dark video is a terrible mess

Summary by Krater

Tom Scott explains why dark scenes in movies and online videos often look banded or blocky, attributing the issue to a lack of available colors, human visual perception, and aggressive lossy compression algorithms.

From the video

Answers: Why do dark video scenes look blocky and banded?

• color banding
• video compression
• color depth
• human visual perception
• dithering

What it concludes

• Digital videos traditionally use 8 bits per pixel, providing 16.7 million colors, which is insufficient to prevent color banding in dark scenes.
• Human vision perceives relative differences in contrast rather than absolute differences, making banding in dark areas more noticeable.
• Dithering can hide color banding by creating fuzzy boundaries between color transitions.
• Streaming services use lossy compression to reduce data rates, which discards fine detail in dark, out-of-focus areas to save bandwidth.