I had been searching for a good balance between editing speed and file size. And I didn't want to have to manage proxies for every single project and hope all ten of the editors were using them correctly. LongGOP is obviously horrible to edit with. The native Intra formats out of the camera aren't much better. ProResLT is a little bit smaller than the lightest Intra camera format and edits like butter, figured that'd be a good solution. I stumbled on Shutter Encoder and absolutely loved how fast/easy to use it is.

I started transcoding everything we shot to ProResLT. This was working really well and the editing speed were awesome except for one problem... horrible banding on anything that had any sort of gradient. I did have a problem with full vs legal levels, but found the correct button to account for that. It helped a little, but the banding was absolutely atrocious.

I did not suspect that Shutter Encoder was the problem for a long time, I just assumed it was a ProResLT problem that I was semi-willing to live with - If we shot interviews with a heavy gradient background I would just use proxies instead. But I found a little free time and did a proper test. I shot the same set up on our Canon C70 in LongGOP, Intra240, Intra410 & HEVC. I ran those files through Shutter Encoder and Adobe Media Encoder. Then I applied the same color correction to everything. Unsurprisingly the original camera files did not have super heavy banding in any format, and the Shutter Encoder had pretty nasty banding. However, the AME files looked much, much better. Still a tiny bit of banding but not nearly as bad as the Shutter Encoder files. The transcodes of the Intra files maaaybe look a tiny bit better than the transcoded LongGOP, but it's a very minor difference.

Interestingly, the file size from each program is vastly different. Both folders contain the full transcoded clips - the Shutter Encoder folder is 607MB vs 1.27GB for AME. Twice the file size. Weird.

PNG stills can be viewed here if you're curious. Should also note I've had gradients that fall apart waaay worse than this test from Shutter Encoder.

EDIT to add TLDR: Shutter Encoder transcodes to ProResLT have a ton of banding, the same files transcoded in Adobe Media Encoder do not.