Bit depth to 10 bits?

[Hall9k]

I can’t understand why DF doesn’t offer the option to change bit depth to 10 bits (i.e. from 16 bits to 10 bits). It’s the standard bit depth for digital video (SDI). Anybody knows how to deal with it?
Thanks (and excuse for my bad english, please). 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hi Hall9k,

Actually, DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO(25), DVCPRO50, HDCAM/CineAlta, DVCPRO-HD, IMX, and Betacam SX are all 8 bit formats. Sony’s DVW Digital Betacam camcorders and VTRs, Sony’s SRW-5000 HD Mastering VTR and Panasonic’s D-5 HD VTRs (and maybe others) are capable of recording at 10 bit.

What file format are you working with?

Eric

[Hall9k]

thanks for the reply…

… but we’re in a prodution room, and we’d like to feed an Accom ClipStore (it manages uncompressed 10 bit SDI video) with our graphic material made in Maya in 16bit and processed in Digital Fusion.

[BergMeister]

In terms of DIGI-Beta, I’ve tried to track down the acurate Bit-Depth information on this format for quite some time and there seems to be quite a lot of confustion around. Reading up on some sony white paper the actual recording format on digi-beta is actually 8bit 4:2:2 in 1 – 1.5 compression. However if you take an SDI feed out of your Digi-Beta machine you’ll have a 10bit 4:4:4 uncompressed signal….
Now… back to the simple life of beta-max for me i think… 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hi Hall9k,

I would simply take advantage of the extra colour precision and set all loaders to 16bits. The only downside is it will be a little slower and use a little more ram. One thing to keep in mind when merging colour depths, Fusion will adjust the image from the foreground input of the tool to match the color depth of the background.

Eric

[Iggs]

One thing to keep in mind is that when you are talking about 10-bit “digital video” you’re talking about YCbCr color space and not RGB color space that DF is working in. To properly represent all information contained within 10-bit YCbCr when converting to RGB you need a minimum of 12 bits in RGB color space due to larger gammut of YCbCr color space. Therefore, working in 16-bit RGB in DF is a good thing.

That’s one of the issues (for example) with working in 8 or 10-bit RGB in Discreet products where you would loose color information when digitizing 10-bit YCbCr … that is better now since FFI works in 12-bit RGB as well.

Another “misconception” shamefully used by marketing people is that 4:4:4 is “better” then 4:2:2 … what they fail to mention is that when saying 4:4:4 they mean RGB color space and when they say 4:2:2 they are talking about YCbCr color space and in doing so are making a false comparison, especially if they are comparing 8-bit RGB with 10-bit YCbCr.

Also, SDI “feed” from Digi-Beta is not 4:4:4 it is ITU-R 601 standard YCbCr 4:2:2 and video output data can internaly be set to either 8-bit or 10-bit word length.

Cheers, I.

p.s. Hi Eric! 😉

[Anonymous]

Igor… is that you???

Eric

[Iggs]

::::waves::::

😀

I.

[Author]

Posts