• VEGAS Pro

  8 bit and 32 render

  Posted by Jerry Waters on September 19, 2007 at 2:37 pm

  I stumbled on a window where you could set either 8 bit or 32 bit color render BUT I can’t remember where I found it. Help and the manual don’t list “32” or “8” anywhere I can find. Anyone know where to find the explanation of this? And on what templates it is available?

  Thanks for any info.

  Glenn Chan replied 18 years, 8 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Douglas Spotted eagle

  September 19, 2007 at 2:57 pm

  Look in your Project Properties window. You’ll find 32 bit in the video properties.
• 

  Kert

  September 19, 2007 at 11:56 pm

  I rendered a 1 hour 15 minute segment avi (with color correction in all segments) on V7 timeline, to MPG2 on Window Vista, running on MacPro laptop (dual 2GHz, 2 Gig memory).
  The render took 1 hour and 43 minutes.

  Then I switched on the 32 bit processing. After 20 minutes the timer indicated 6 hours and 26 minutes rendering time for the same segment described above. You pay for 32 bits.

  By the way does 32 bit rendering means that the color is also processed at 32 bits? DSL and other could you explain how 32 bit helps and how it works.
  Thanks, JK
• 

  Glenn Chan

  September 20, 2007 at 8:34 pm

  There are essentially three modes in Vegas:

  8-bit (always 2.222 compositing gamma)
  32-bit / 2.222
  32-bit / 1.000 (this is the slowest AFAIK)

  The underlying difference is:
  8-bit mode versus 32-bit mode
  2.222 versus 1.000 compositing gamma

  There are four possible combinations, but 8-bit / 1.000 is disallowed.

  More info here:
  https://glennchan.info/articles/vegas/v8color/v8color.htm

  (No point in re-typing my own article.)
  There are some color space conversion issues to watch out for- it’s more complicated in 32-bit.

  2- The biggest difference between 8-bit and 32-bit is that it allows you to do linear light processing. See:

  https://glennchan.info/articles/vegas/linlight/linlight.htm

  But to do linear light processing you (sort of) have to go out of your way to do it.

  2b- Otherwise, the other benefit you will see is improved precision. 32-bit will get rid of banding artifacts caused by not enough bit depth in processing. (Certain other types of banding it won’t get rid of, e.g. if you start with an 8-bit source and go crazy with color curves. You need dithering to fix that.)

  Usually you don’t have problems with banding artifacts if the source is noisy or you don’t have very large gradients in your footage.

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