Image quality priority setting in HC?

[Titanium48]

I've encoded a clip with HC and noticed that low contrast scenes (particularly darker ones) have a lot of "contouring noise", like you get if you set your monitor to 16 bit color rather than 24 or 32. Using CCE 2.5 I could fix this problem by increasing the "image quality priority" setting to around 40. How does one accomplish the same thing with HC?

[Mug Funky]

"contouring" typically comes down to decoding or filtering issues.

either way we'll need to know what's decoding your video, and what filters might be getting run on it.

banding is usually from YUV to RGB conversions, especially when contrast is low. but if you say CCE is solving the problem i'm not sure what could be causing the banding. typically i'll get better results with HC than with anything else (unless we're pressing against the max bitrate, in which case HC will be more agressive). of course results are always close...