10-bit video hosting for graded footage.
Host 10-bit HEVC without re-encoding it.

Banding is a quantisation artifact. Encoding a picture means rounding every sample to one of the values the format allows, and the visible error is the size of the gap you rounded across. In a busy frame nobody sees it: detail, grain and motion scatter the error into noise your eye reads as texture. In a flat frame there is nothing to hide behind. A dusk sky, a white cyclorama, a slow fade to black, a skin tone rolling into shadow: these are exactly the regions where neighbouring pixels differ by one or two code values, and where a coarse rounding step turns a gradual ramp into a staircase.

A grade makes this worse before it makes it better. Lifting shadows, pulling contrast, adding a colour cast: every one of those operations stretches a narrow range of source values across a wider output range. If the source held 256 levels, the stretch multiplies the gaps between them. If it held 1,024, there is four times the material to stretch, and the result still lands on a fine enough grid to look continuous. This is the reason colourists insist on 10-bit acquisition, and the reason a 10-bit master and an 8-bit master of the same shot are not interchangeable deliverables.

Bit depth also feeds the encoder. Precision in a flat area is what lets a codec allocate bits sensibly there instead of quantising the whole region to a handful of values and hoping nobody notices. Fewer code values plus coarse quantisation is the recipe for banding, and it is the combination the rest of this page is about, because both halves of it are decided by the platform you upload to.

Read the table for what it does not say as much as what it does. Nobody here is accusing either platform of throwing away your grade on purpose, and neither of them publishes the chroma subsampling of what it sends to a viewer, so this page will not guess at it. What both of them do state, in their own words, is that the file a viewer receives is not the file you sent. It was re-encoded, into more than one format, and on Vimeo the largest of those formats has a published ceiling of up to 22 Mbps in 4K.

That ceiling is the number worth sitting with. It is not a criticism of Vimeo, whose figure is in line with what the streaming industry as a whole is built around. It is a statement about what a delivery rendition is for. Which brings us to the best available yardstick.

Put a graded master beside that ladder and the gap is not marginal. A 4K delivery export at 100 to 200 Mbps is roughly six to twelve times Apple’s top 4K HEVC rung. This is not a flaw in the specification. A ladder exists to hold a picture together across a hotel wifi and a phone on cellular, and 16,800 kbps is a considered answer to that problem. It is simply a different problem from showing a colourist’s work to the person who paid for it.

The same specification carries a second detail that matters more to this page than the bitrates do. It requires HEVC streams to be Main 10 Profile, Level 4.0 Main Tier for maximum compatibility. Main 10 is the 10-bit profile. The document the industry authors its ladders against does not offer 8-bit HEVC as an option at all, which is the strongest official signal available that 10-bit is the professional streaming baseline rather than a specialist request. If you have been treating a 10-bit deliverable as something to apologise for, stop.

A film aimed at a general audience on mixed devices, over connections you will never see, is exactly the problem adaptive streaming was invented to solve. Send that to YouTube or Vimeo. YouTube costs nothing, reaches an audience no other platform can, and carries search, recommendation and monetisation that have no equivalent here. Vimeo’s player, marketing tools, privacy controls and OTT products are a real product line, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. 8-bit H.264 remains the format with the broadest playback coverage anywhere, and if a stranger on an unknown device has to see your film, that is the format to hand them.

The case for hosting a 10-bit master untouched is narrower and specific: the grade review, the client approval, the colourist’s reel, the festival screener, the delivery of a finished film to the person who paid for it. Those viewers are known, their machines are known or knowable, and the whole point of the file is the precision a delivery ladder is designed to spend. Use the right tool on each side of that line, and understand what bitrate is doing before you decide which side a given job sits on.