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10bit or 8bit
After posting a message on a different topic, I was told by jbrad2 that using 10bit uncompressed footage was overkill and that 8bit compressed would work just as well.
Is 10bit really overkill? We’re doing Standard Def NTSE television commercials. We do a lot of After Effects work and color correction.
I would love the extra disk space, but I don’t want to sacrafice quality.
Any other opinions would be great to hear.
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6 Replies
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I totally agree. 8 bit is plenty good for SD. The only tiny thing 10 bit can get you is a little smoother gradient, but a little noise can usually fix that.
If you really want to save space, take a look at the Sheer codec. bitjazz.com
Have a wonderful day.
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Reins,
8-bit looks great, 10-bit is better. But you shouldn’t let drive space dictate that decision. 300gb hard drives are available now for only $125, so if your aim is to provide your clients with the highest quality product that you can deliver, don’t cut yourself short over a few hundred bucks worth of hardware.
DRW
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Drive space really isn’t the issue. We have an Xraid with tons of space. I was curious as to whether render times and playback sync would improve going to 8 bit, but that the quality would not be sacraficed to a great degree. Also, I like to backup my effects .movs to disc, so 8bit would require less disks and burning. correct?
I guess I want to know how big of a difference is there between 8bit amd 10bit and whether it would be noticable to the average joe.
Thanks for your input.
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95% of the time 8 bit is totally fine. 10 bit will give you a bit of extra color fidelity – but unless you’re doing greenscreen or have lots of gradients in your spot – I wouldn’t hesitate to use 8 bit. But heck, if you’ve got the drive space, just do 10 bit and you never have to second guess yourself.
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Reins,
The “average Joe” cannot tell the difference. It is so minimal, I can hardly tell. As pointed out, the advantage to 10 bit relate to color correcting and keying, but I am of the opinion that it’s really spliting hairs. As far as render times I don’t think it would make much difference.
Have a wonderful day.
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Hi, thought I’d chime in here… I have gone with 10-bit everything since we setup this box, and everything looks great in 10-bit. We do high end regional/national commercials, so I want it as good as it can be. That said, let me give you a few reasons to look at 8-bit.
The main problem that I have with 10-bit is the lack of support for motion-blur as well as many other, random plug-ins that you might use all the time (e.g. Sapphire glows, etc.) If you try to apply these to a 10-bit clip (with YUV rendering, which is default, turned on) you will see some of that nasty green noise all over the place. I was glad to see that FCP finally improved their motion blur (it is actually usuable now) and I was all excited to throw it on some graphics that I wanted to slam down onto the screen (can you tell I do a lot of car spots??), but the 10-bit in FCP is still broke. So for me, I have this workaround: When applying an effect to a clip in a 10-bit sequence, I go ahead and open Sequence Settings/Video Processing and change it to “always render in RGB”. Then the effect will render, and look right. But then I get to enjoy the little message that FCP shows me when I go to output to tape, reminding me that the overall quality of what I am about to output has been compromised by rendering in RGB. Well, that’s just great!!
As stated above… the average joe isn’t going to notice if something was rendered in RGB or not obviously, but one could argue 8-bit YUV vs. 10-bit RGB, and since I’m not an engineer (and have no honest idea which would be preferable) I’ll go with which is easier for the editor… And to me, the 8-bit would be easier along with saving some drive space.
Just my $.02
-Todd Beabout
Vazda Studios
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