AE 16-bit vs. Media Composer 10-bit

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sean90291

Veteran
Stu Maschwitz has written a great book on DIY digital filmmaking (The DV Rebel's Guide) and a big part of the book is devoted to onlining in After Effects to take advantage of the 16-bit and 32-bit color depth, especially since most NLE's we have at home only offer 8-bit depth color.

So, he has me pretty much convinced that 8-bit is just going to destroy my footage...but I realize that Media Composer offers 10-bit color. I'm just curious what your opinions might be on the difference between 10-bit vs. 16-bit. Maybe going to After Effects for onlining isn't as critical when you have access to 10-bit offered by Media Composer. Certainly the folks over at Avid's forum thought that the idea of onlining in After Effects was INSANE.

So 16-bit at all costs? Or 10-bit to save us a lot of headache (no importing and exporting timelines to AE, Avid's real-time previews, etc.).

Note: the Media Composer user guide describes Effects Processing with a 16-bit option and says:

"Select this option for the best overall image quality. Use this
option if you use 10-bit resolutions, use many levels of nested
effects, or want the best color fidelity for rendered effects."


So I'm a bit confused about the difference between the resolution bit-depth and the effects bit-depth. Which bit-depth is Stu talking about in his book, resolution or effects?

cheers.
 
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Typically you'd export 10-bit to your effects program, do all the effects at 16-bit or 32-bit, and then export back to a 10-bit file for Avid... that way if you do multiple effects on one piece of footage, you won't be losing half a bit of precision on every effect.

I'm not sure why they think you're crazy for using After Effects, but I haven't used that software with Avid myself.
 
Okay, but something like Sapphire are apparently 16-bit effects. Are they still 16-bit inside of a 10-bit MC Software project?
 
sean90291 said:
So, he has me pretty much convinced that 8-bit is just going to destroy my footage...
Click to expand...
Your best option is to fire up the Avid and conduct some tests. That way you can see for yourself the effect of bit depth on the image.

I haven't read Stu's book so it's unfair for me to comment but I'll comment anyway. Based on your statements above some of the logic seems to contradict itself. The notion that most home NLE's are 8 bit implies that they are lower end systems because the home user can't afford a high end NLE. I get that part. The part I don't get is the subjective arguments about 8bit vs 10bit. If the home user can't afford a high end NLE then they certainly can't afford a broadcast quality reference monitor. If that's the case then how would you judge the difference between 8bit and 10bit if you don't have a proper monitor?

Stu is right about keeping a clean signal. If you keep the signal as clean as possible throughout the post pipeline your end product will look better. However, I must question the practicallity of using an application designed for motion graphics for any serious editorial. I suppose it all depends on the turnaround time and the delivery format of the end product.
 
Thanks milksac. In defence of Stu's workflow suggestions, the final color correction and effects in AE are meant to be after the cut is totally complete. No cutting in AE. Just the color correction and effects.

He's also suggesting AE because it's 16-bit and 32-bit floating point, which is the equivalent of a DaVinci and Flame...certainly MUCH higher end than any home NLE system can offer for color correction, etc. That's what my big question was: whether 10 bit Media Composer offered significantly better results than 8-bit FCP or Avid Xpress. If it is significantly better, it might make Stu's AE workflow less important when you have MC Software. I guess MC Software is six bits worse than AE and 2-bits better than FCP...whatever that means. Not sure what it means practically.

Good point about needing a good monitor to be able to reference these effects, but good 1080p monitors are certainly accessible to home systems now, right?
 
Hey guys!

There was a lively discussion of this on ProLost not long ago:

http://prolost.blogspot.com/2007/02/mastering-in-nle.html

I wanted to jump in because I think in the past I've maybe overstated the importance of AE's bit-depth advantage a little bit. It's important, but not (in my opinion) in and of itself worth importing your project into AE. What makes it worth the effort to online in AE is all the crazy awesome creative tools you have there, for masked corrections, denoising, high-quality resizing and repoing, minor comp gags like sky replacements, and the ability to compare multiple shots for consistency (using scripts I supply with The Guide). The extra bit-depth is like the icing on the cake.

Some folks don't get excited about the idea of sculpting their film with all those powerful tools, but I do, and I've tried to infect others with that excitement. But I don't mean to suggest that onlining in the NLE is bad or wrong.

Hope that helps the convo,

-Stu
 
This is all long overdue as far as discussion is concerned. While I own 3 Avid's and am a beta tester for them, I do wish the company would do more to accommodate those of us who refuse to overspend on a Nitris or otherwise. I'd love to see them integrate a lower cost HD I/O (not compressed DVCPro HD codec via firewire), and provide a more useful color timer as effects are not as important to users such as myself -the manipulation of the footage and maintaining as much purity as possible is important to me, having delivered more than 100 hours of nationally broadcast content.

I have also done the research. Look at what it costs to have Automatic Duck and AE7 along with a Blackmagic HD card or Aja Xena 2 (for those of us using Windows). That way you can take your locked picture EDL and export it from Avid into AE. There you can capture 10 bit HD RGB 4:4:4, do whatever effects you like, timing and such, and you can output to HD, generating a pristine master. The cost to do this in the Avid is generally cost prohibitive, and you're dealing with 10 bit content in SD, unless you have the Adrenaline HD hardware which is about 10x the price of what I've just outlined (I have Automatic Duck and AE already).

What I will say is that 10 bit is certainly better than 8 bit and SDI is better than component. We're lucky enough to have HD CRT with HD-SDI and SD-SDI. With high end monitors is it easy to see what happens when you manipulate content such as DVCam or Beta SP or SX or HDCam for that matter.

I don't have experience with 16 bit even though I have after effects -but I have taken material captured from Avid as 10 bit and exported files to AE, rendered in AE as uncompressed TIFF sequence and brought back into the Avid for a Digital Cut, generally to Digi Beta for mastering. This results is very passable material.

But let us continue the discussion over alternative posting techniques...
 
Hey Joe. I'd love to hear more about getting the most out of Avid using a range of posting techniques...but I don't know enough about the engineering as you do, so I can only ask questions. Not much use, huh? But sometimes I coax the geniuses out of the woodwork for all our benefit. Managing HD is my biggest interest right now--a technology in perpetual flux.
 
Sorry Oliver S. Wish I had an answer to your technical question.

Instead, I have a question myself. I keep posing it, but it gets lost in threads, and I can't find the answer anywhere. So I'll be brief:

Media Composer is referred to as 10-bit. Various Avid plug-in effects (like Sapphire) are referred to as 16-bit. Are we talking about different things between MC's 10-bit bit depth and Sapphire's 16-bit color space? Just wondering what happens to 16-bit effects within a 10-bit Avid MC project.
 
Express Pro also gives you the option to render in 16 bit. This is higher than 8 and 10 bit of course...both Express pro and MC INPUT and OUTPUT at 10bit via SDI. Beware of your render and transcode settings.

To answer Oliver: sorry to confuse -you have to capture the media via Adobe Premiere Pro and you can take the content into AE7 or whatever else for your timing...of course, who knows, this might be an interesting capbility if the new AE8 announces some changes.
 
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