Why do my soft gradients look so bad?

I can't figure out why anytime i use a softgradient for a background the final rendered project looks terrible. While in Motion looking at the stage, the gradient is a smooth as can be and looks great, but as soon as i preview it on my ntsc monitor or export to FCP, it looks terrible: banding and bad color reproduction. I've tried multiple monitors all with the same results.
I've tried changing the project properties from 8 to 16 to 32bit but you can still see the banding. I see subtle/soft gradients like this on tv all the time, so i know that ntsc TV's can reproduce it. what am i doing wrong?

Hey Patrick--
tried the reduce banding filter (exactly what i was looking for) but it didn't help as much as i was hoping...even on it's max setting. You can still see the banding (not quite as bad) but now with some grit to it. So I added a directional blur to it also...that seems to help enough to make it production worthy.
Does everyone have to do this if they want a subtle gradient or does this have something to do with my project settings?

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helpmemama wrote:
Why do the photos in my first InDesign project look really bad? Noticed as I "placed" them, some PDFs or JPEGs (not photos, but PDFs converted to JPEG) looked pretty distorted. Went ahead with the 60+ page project, converted to PDF, sent to client. He converted to a flipbook to proof and really didn't like the photos. Here's the irony. Upgraded to InDesign for this client. Was using Publisher as a standby until I could afford InDesign. Signed up with the Creative Cloud because job was overwhelming Publisher.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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xslamx wrote:
> I'm trying to recreate a nav bar mock up in Flash that I
mocked in Photoshop.
> The background of my nav bar in Photoshop has a nice
smooth gradient going from
> black to red to black, but when I pull out a rectangle
in Flash and add a
> gradient to it, the gradient looks very choppy and
doesn't have a smooth
> transition from one color level to the next. Is it just
that Flash doesn't
> make as good of gradients as Photoshop or is there some
kind of quality setting
> that I have to bump up in Flash? Thanks.
>

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