[Cmerritt]

He didn’t really say it’s a limitation of WinXP, but of the software. That if a given software uses avi or quicktime as a default format, those are only 8-bit.

However, I have used Aftereffects on WinXP with 16-bit projects, and that software notifies you if an effect is 16-bit or will truncate to 8-bit.

So that limitation is software dependant.

[Cmerritt]

Thanks for your reponse.
I read your thread but Luke Maslen’s response doesn’t make much sense to me.

“the number of bits used to store the movie on your hard disk is completely independant of the number of bits used by an application to process the file. An application might use 8, 16, 24 or 32-bit processing but that does not relate to how the file is then stored on disk. That final task is performed by the codec, which could be the 8-bit Microsoft codec or the 10-bit Blackmagic codec.” – Luke Maslen

I understand this, but when I opened the actual 10-bit capture from FCP, a BM codec file, without any processing whatsoever, AE reported it as “millions of colors”.

It seems as if the BM codec is not actually capturing 10-bit at all, or it’s not store it as 10-bit, or Ae is not reporting it correctly.

For example, I just now rendered from a 16-bpc AE project a BM file. It gave me the option of saving “trillions of colors”. Okay, that’s good. But when I re-import the file, AE says the file has “millions of colors”.

I don’t get it.