10-bit looks awful!!

Blackmagic Design

10-bit looks awful!!

Posted by Ben List on November 19, 2006 at 2:59 pm

Sorry I’ve got several queries at once.
I’ve been using Decklink Extreme for a few years on a G4 and hadn’t had any issues or troubles until recently.
We have several machines in our office and our workflow revolves around rendering from After Effects and outputting via Final Cut Pro. One day after some system updates and subsequent Decklink updates we realized that our codecs were gone and replaced with some we hadn’t seen before.
It took a bit of time to realize that 10-bit duties were now being handled by the Apple Uncompressed 10-bit 422 codec. So for the first time in a few months I got it right recently and started outputting with Apple’s 422 only to run into some unexpected problems with the codec.

1) Color handling seems noticibly worse with the 10-bit codec compared to the 8-bit codec. I’m getting nasty, blocky banding and compression artifacts. I tried outputting some tests with rainbow and monotone gradations, and get consistantly bad results from the 10-bit codec. The codec, despite being heavier than Animation or None, looks a whole lot worse. What might the cause for this be?

2) Also I understand that an option for “Trillions of Colors” should appear somewhere in After Effects (using 6.5) but its greyed out in every likely menu. Any ideas?

3) Even though the codec has been placed in the “Library/Quicktime” folder with other codecs, and Final Cut has no trouble locating the codec, I can’t seem to get After Effects to locate it on some of my machines. I get “Apple Intermediate” and “H264” options, but no “Apple Uncompressed 422.” For some odd reason one machine shows “FCP Uncompressed 10-bit 422” and another shows a “Apple Uncompressed 10-bit 422” and another doesn’t show either. Any guesses as to why one machine wouldn’t allow access to the codec from the codec menu in After Effects?

FYI I’m in Japan and have set the gamma for Japan’s NTSC setting. I’m going for NTSC SD output.

Kristian Lam replied 19 years, 5 months ago 4 Members · 5 Replies
5 Replies

Jason Levy
November 19, 2006 at 9:14 pm

https://www.hdforindies.com/2006/06/after-effects-stuff-workflow-tips-and.html

Just happened on this.. it seem relevant.

jason
Kristian Lam
November 20, 2006 at 4:27 am

Hi,

The DeckLink Installer edits the After Effects preferences. If you install After Effects after installing the DeckLink drivers, this will not happen. To enable trillions of colours for the Blackmagic codecs, please reinstall the drivers again. This will be easier than manually editing the preference file.

regards

Kristian Lam
Blackmagic Design
Ben List
November 20, 2006 at 8:28 am

Oh man, thanks guys. That solved most all my queries. It looks alot better anyway.

The only thing I can think of is that I must have had AE open when installing the drivers or something.
Also changing “project settings” to 16-bit did the trick.
Simon Choi
December 5, 2006 at 12:34 pm

Hi Kristian

Thanks for your posted solution, this answers my question i posted recently on ‘Installing Uncompressed 10 bit codecs for After Effects 7’

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=98&postid=861831

Could you tell what the three or four letter code for Uncompressed 10 bit, if i needed to edit the AFX preference file manually.

Thanks

Si

i-choi
Kristian Lam
December 5, 2006 at 10:42 pm

Hi Simon,

It’s v210.

regards

Kristian Lam
Blackmagic Design

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