10-bit acquisition?
 

Most of the HD acquisition formats I've looked at only record in an 8-bit color space, except for HDCAM SR. Is anyone else planning on making a camera that can acquire in 10-bit in the future? Is there any advantage for taking an 8-bit video and reingesting it into a 10-bit DI outside of giving yourself a bit of color correction lattitude?

I'm pretty sure RED will be 10-bit or better.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=110

I don't think that actually gives you more latitude in color correction. If you can render in 32-bit precision anyways, then ingesting 10-bit isn't going to help.

I think its a waste of storage space and system resources unless you're maybe working in a compositing situation where you'd be for example applying extreme color correction to other layers or bringing in CGI perhaps.

10-bit acquisition can help though.

If you need to capture more than the standard exposure latitude, then higher bit depth is require to keep the same detail in the tonal ranges.

To clarify:
Standard exposure latitude: The 709 and 601 define the transfer functions so that the ratios of light from the display is the same as the ratios of light entering the camera. If you try to squeeze lots of stops of exposure latitude onto a recording format, this is no longer true (output isn't the same as the input).


I don't know if that makes any sense.

I thought the live head feeds off the HDV cams was 10bit equivalent, where the SDI XL-H1 output has been determind to be 8bit. This is what I understood from what David Newman has said.

Oh, yeah, if your original data is 10 bits of course it's better. But in the case Jeremy suggested, starting with 8bit and ingesting 10bit it's not going to help greatly in most cases.

We are going through all the research right now to determine what format we need to be working in from an NLE standpoint. I've got people telling me in my company that we have to be in a 10 bit workflow which will require real time ingest into either Cineform or DNxHD. (Currently, we are a Premiere Pro shop, but are considering moving to AVID.) At this point, we are leaning towards XDCAM HD from an acquisition standpoint, but ideally I'd love to be able to work directly with the MXF files on the XDCAM HD disks and not have to reingest everything in real time. Although, at this point I'm not sure that either Premiere or Avid will allow for full native editing of these files. The impression I get is that the MXF files would have to be wrapped in some other format, even if the essence files could be placed directly on the timeline.

Yeesh! Was working in SD ever this confusing?

Avid Xpress Pro HD works with MXF files now: all captured video seems to be wrapped up into MXF. So check for yourself, but I think it should do 'import' of MXF files without recompressing, just copying.

Xpress Pro HD (I presume that's what you'd move to if using Premiere Pro now) doesn't seem to support editing of 10-bit DNxHD, though I haven't tried too hard to make it work.

The HD-SDI recording I'm currently working on will be 10 bit and I'm planning on a component adapter which will sample higher then 10 bit and reduce down to 10 bit for a parallel interface into our deck.

So its not a camera, but it will give you 10 bit with current cameras. (even though the canon h1 is still only 8 bit). Unfortunately were still just finishing up working on a prototype so its not a shipping product.

"Oh, yeah, if your original data is 10 bits of course it's better. But in the case Jeremy suggested, starting with 8bit and ingesting 10bit it's not going to help greatly in most cases."

I would agree with Matthew on this from my experience. As long as all of the CC and FX are rendered out to a higher space. Thats where it really counts.