During a final quality check of an exported video, if you notice blocky or pixelated areas in smooth gradients, what specific compression-related artifact is present?

The specific compression-related artifact present when you notice blocky or pixelated areas in smooth gradients is called color banding, often simply referred to as banding. This artifact occurs because the video compression process uses an insufficient number of distinct colors to accurately represent a continuous range of shades or hues within a gradient. During compression, especially lossy compression, the number of bits allocated to describe the color information for each pixel, known as bit depth, might be reduced. Bit depth determines the total number of unique colors that can be displayed; for instance, 8-bit color offers 256 shades per color channel (red, green, blue), while a lower bit depth like 6-bit offers only 64 shades per channel. When a smooth gradient, which ideally contains a vast continuum of color variations, is compressed with a low bit depth, the original continuous color values must be mapped to a limited set of available discrete color values through a process called quantization. Quantization is the process of approximating continuous data with a set of discrete values. If the difference between these discrete values is too great, the transition from one color to the next becomes abrupt and visually distinct, rather than smooth. This results in the appearance of distinct strips or bands of color instead of a seamless flow. For example, a perfect sunset gradient should transition imperceptibly from red to orange to yellow; however, with color banding, you would see clear, separate stripes of red, then orange, then yellow, where the subtle variations between them have been lost and replaced by a single, blocky color value.