V8 32Bit Basic Question

F

flowerschangetheworld

Member
If I use 8 bit throughout the editing of my feature...am I losing any advantage by not using 32 bit floating. I plan on having the feature CC'd by a professional colorist. Anybody....

Just having problem understanding the advantages of 32 bit besides color correcting in vegas 8.

Thanks
 
Flowers,
I'm not too familiar with the topic, but I have to assume (and please people correct me if I'm wrong) that if you are doing any transitions, titles, fx, or any manipulation of the footage in any way other than straight cuts, the 32bit floating point will improve your final output.
 
I really wish others with more knowledge would chime in. But I belive HDV is 8 bit.
The advantage of going 32bit floating point if I understand it correctly is this.

If you have two video streams. one is a gradiant of light blue to dark blue in an 8 bit format. The second is a gradiant of light red to dark red in 8 bit format.

If you set up your project to 32bit. and just do staright cuts, you are not altering the colors what so ever. so when you dump them back to a 8 bit deliverable, you get the same thing you had.
But if you mix the two streams by overlaying them on top of one another with opacity set to less than 100% on the top one, then there are many more colors in between the reds and blues in a 32 bit space than an 8 bit space.

therefore, if you are color correcting, or even doing a fade in -fade out transition, or adding titles with a soft edge. (any time you combine color or alter the color or brightness, etc..) you would want to do it in a 32bit color space rather than an 8 bit.

Its kind of doing a gradiant from black to white with 256 colors, and one with 16million colors. the 16 million color gradient will be much smoother than the 256.

anyway, that's my 2 cents. If I'm incorrect, please some one correct me.
Thanks.
 
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