Here's Why You Want 10 Bit Even If You Eventually Encode to an 8 Bit File

In a guest post on Dare Dreamer Magazine, Vasili Pasioudis of Aegean Films explains the difference between 8 bit and 10 bit and why having the extra bit depth makes a difference. He writes, "Higher bit depths gives us more colors to ‘pull from’ or more ‘latitude’ in post color grading, where we are trying to pull from a larger pool of colors and push those colors into a smaller ‘range’ of colors since that will ultimately be encoded to an 8bit video file, and viewed on 8bit monitors for the masses (there are higher than 8 bpc video files and monitors but most of us won’t get to see those). The 5D3 and other DSLRs like most of today’s still cameras actually see color at 14bit, and this is recorded at 14bit when shooting raw stills but is only captured as 8bit when shooting video or jpg stills. If we could bypass the h264 video compression and capture the direct stream coming from the chip, then we would have a good argument of why we need to spend 20x time on a digital cinema camera."

Read the full piece here.

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