The Editblog

One debate I’ve been seeing and hearing is the debate of doing your finishing with RED footage (or any other footage for that matter I guess) in a  10 bit color workflow vs. an 8 bit color workflow. It would seem like a no-brainer to use 10 bit color as it is of higher quality with more information in the image vs. using an 8 bit. This is true but working in 10 bit can require more computing horsepower, sometimes specific types of editing and color grading systems and being diligent especially with RED footage so you don’t take it through a step that converts the original .R3D files down to something that is 8 bit. You can achieve a 10 bit workflow with Final Cut Pro and ProRes HQ but you have to convert the files in a specific way, have your FCP sequence settings correct and make sure you have a powerful enough graphics card to render any effects. The latter hit me doing some testing as my graphics card only has 256 mb of VRAM and I was running two displays so I kept getting a render error. Yet another reason why it’s helpful to have a professionally set-up and maintained system for full quality onlining of a program. It’s a lot of technical stuff and it can make your head spin! It makes me happy to have an engineer around to sort through it all. There’s also the debate of whether or not one can see a difference in 8 bit and 10 bit. We’ve had both color spaces running through color grading and when you start pushing the image, the 10 bit holds up much, much better. If you can do it then why not?

To help sort through some of this madness there’s a great resource at Coremelt, Roger Bolton’s website for the plug-in effects that he writes to support the FxFactory suite. Roger has recently released a set of transitions called PolyChrome. These transitions (a $99 download) all support a true 10 bit workflow, unlike many of the default FCP transitions. And they are just some really cool looks to boot. Roger has written two articles to help explain and understand the 10 bit workflow and how it relates to the RED camera.

Codec and Effects Limitations for 10 Bit online workflow with Final Cut Pro 6.0.2
Red Camera 10 Bit Color Online Workflow with FCP 6.0.2

These are two great reads if you want to set up your FCP system to work in 10 bit. Not everyone is lucky enough to have an engineer around to help understand these things so thanks to people like Roger for providing resources out on the ‘net.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 8:37 am and is filed under Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.