Colour Bit Depth Confusion

[Richard Herd]

[Stefan Evans] “So, on premier I can export as 24 bit color depth or 48 bit.

now an 8 bit dslr footage = 24 bit right?
so 48 bit would a 16bit file?

But if I send it to after effects and change it from billions to trillions of colours, this is how I make it a 10 bit file.

so is 48 bit (16bit) better than 10 bit (trillions of colours)?
“

You have three color channels Red, Green, Blue. Each channel is 8-bit. So there are values in each channel that are 2^8=256 steps, which is (0…255). When we say 8-bit, we mean 8-bits per channel; we do not multiply.

Here are two really important articles for much more information than you ever really wanted!

https://www.theasc.com/magazine/jan05/conundrum/page1.html

https://library.creativecow.net/galt_john/John_Galt_2K_4K_Truth_About_Pixels/1

If your image capture is 8-bit, then adding bits to the image is not really going to change the image (except is file size) because the data are not there to begin with.