Color Correction - Prem/AE Workflow

Could someone explain why? I typically need to render throughout the project so that I can watch the project in real time -- especially with any AVCHD footage.

Why don't you use the original clips for the final render while continuing with what you're doing so that you can work with the footage?

Re-rendering is inadvisable because of degradation in quality.
 
Why don't you use the original clips for the final render while continuing with what you're doing so that you can work with the footage?

Re-rendering is inadvisable because of degradation in quality.

Could you say that in simple terms that my simple mind can understand? I must be missing some critical part of the workflow here...

I import footage, drag parts of that footage to the timeline, edit, and render periodically throughout the piece so that timing changes or reverse speed type of things will playback normally while I am working on them. And then when I consider the piece to be picture locked, I encode. What should I be doing different? It sounds like I am potentially degrading my clips, from what's been said here.
 
Could you say that in simple terms that my simple mind can understand? I must be missing some critical part of the workflow here...

I import footage, drag parts of that footage to the timeline, edit, and render periodically throughout the piece so that timing changes or reverse speed type of things will playback normally while I am working on them. And then when I consider the piece to be picture locked, I encode. What should I be doing different? It sounds like I am potentially degrading my clips, from what's been said here.

I was speaking only about importing rendered clips, making adjustments, and then rendering them again. I misunderstood what you were saying, not realizing that you render only to view the results while you are working and before the only real render. In AE, this is pre-rendering and it's very helpful both in speeding up previews as well as the final render. So, what you do does not impact the quality of your final render. Sorry for the confusion.
 
Try rendering out a targa sequence. AVI's and MOV's can get corrupted and you'll lose all of your work. It's safer to have an image sequence to work with.
Hey, I have had compatibility problems with AVI and MOV before, Vegas doesn't have a Targa sequence option, would rendering to PNG work? I rendered a PNG from both Vegas and AE and they both came out 32bit RGBA LZ77 compression which I think is lossless. One of the things I liked most about DNxHD is it takes your 8bit and converts it to a 10bit for color grading. I'm not sure if that helps at all, but wouldn't a 32bit PNG be even better for color grading? (think I just learned something, 32bits = the bits/pixel*frame, and the 8bit/10bit thing = resolution of something...)

Argh, I just totally forgot about color format conversion and stuff, I heard it's bad to convert between RGB/YUV formats, my final output will be YV12 4:2:0 most of the time, and the files from the T2i are YUV 4:2:0. But people are converting to RGB 4:2:2 for color correcting right so it must be ok?

Well anyway I just confused myself like hell, probably posted a bunch of nonsense too.
 
One of the things I liked most about DNxHD is it takes your 8bit and converts it to a 10bit for color grading. I'm not sure if that helps at all, but wouldn't a 32bit PNG be even better for color grading? (think I just learned something, 32bits = the bits/pixel*frame, and the 8bit/10bit thing = resolution of something...)

This can all be a bit confusing, but basically the #bit thing is referring to how many steps of luminance channels have in a video have. Normally there are three channels, red, green, and blue. Sometimes there's a fourth channel called the alpha channel which carries transparency information (you'd never get an alpha channel from camera footage).

Now there are different ways of talking about the bit depth of the channels...sometimes it's listed as 8bpc (bits per channel), and this means that each channel (red, green and blue) are 8bit. But sometimes people list the added bits, so for a RGB image they'd call it a 24bit image, and a RGBA image would be called a 32bit image. But they're still just 8bits per channel.

But sometimes there are actual 16 bits per channel and 32bits per channel images (or 10bit, 12bit, 14bit, whatever), which is super confusing since they can be confused when people list image bit depth by adding the channels together.

So you'd need to check to see if that PNG is 32bits total, or 32bits per channel. It might just be an 8bit image, and it's adding the RGBA channels together to get to 32bit.
 
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