• Avid Media Composer

  What bit depth does Avid use internally? Does timeline video quality affect it?

  Posted by Juan Juig on August 19, 2020 at 7:56 pm

  When you are adding effects and colour correction to clips, does Avid process them in 32bit floating point like Davinci Resolve, or does it use a different internal picture bit depth processing? 16bit? 12bit? 10bit? 8bit?

  Also I have another question to which I’m getting different feedback: does the setting of timeline picture quality (10 bit green, green, green/yellow, yellow) affect the quality of these?:

  – Video mixdowns
  – Rendered effects
  – Final exports

  My experience so far is that it does not. It would also make a lot of sense that it doesn’t, since this is (at least that’s my understanding) related only to playback/preview. But I’ve read on some forums that people had a different experience. Is that some sort of a bug that previous versions had? If so, which versions had those bugs?

  Best regards

  Oliver Peters replied 6 years ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Glenn Sakatch

  August 21, 2020 at 3:57 pm

  Very easy to test.
  Set your timeliness picture quality to the lowest possible setting, and do an output or mix down.

  View your output outside of Avid, and it should look fine.
  Change your settings to high quality and view your mix down in Avid. It should look fine.

  There are some plug-ins that do use that monitoring for their functions to analyze the shot, so you may have to flip back and forth on occasion.

  Not sure about the internal processing, but I would be surprised if it was 32 bit. Guessing 10 or 12.

  Glenn
• 

  Juan Juig

  August 22, 2020 at 1:07 pm

  I’ve done the test you mentioned and got the results that you predicted.

  According to this post: https://community.avid.com/forums/p/197150/882571.aspx#882571

  “[…] Timeline quality setting is not affecting render/mixdown quality.

  […] the processing is actually 16 bits. So, when working with 10 or 12 bits media, the processing is 16 bits.

  With 2019.6 coming soon, we are introducing floating point, in this case precision is 32 bits (float)”

  So are both of the statements entirely correct? Are they also correct for all the previous versions of Avid? Was it always a fact that timeline quality setting is not affecting render/mixdown quality or is this something that was done later?
• 

  Oliver Peters

  August 23, 2020 at 5:37 pm

  Scroll to the bottom here:

  https://www.avid.com/media-composer

  32-bit float

  – Oliver

  Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

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