10-bit & Shake

[Charles Angus]

Flogging the dead horse, here.

Importing Apple UC 10-bit 422 QTs into Shake gives me random colourful pixels on the right edge of frame.

Is there another codec I could be using that will give me a working 10 bits in to Shake, or must I use DPX/TIFF?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Ziggy Uszkurat]

Try prores...

Ziggx

 

[Charles Angus]

Pro-res isn't high enough quality for me, but thanks for the response. I have been unsatisfied with it compared to uncompressed.

 

[Ziggy Uszkurat]

In that case, you'll need to go the tiff or dpx route...

Ziggx

 

[Charles Angus]

That's kinda what I thought. Thanks, Ziggy.

PS. I really hate having to use After Effects to make image sequences of Quicktime files to work in Shake...

 

[Andrew Walker]

Pro-res isn't high enough quality for me, but thanks for the response. I have been unsatisfied with it compared to uncompressed.

So what do you see in Pro-Res that you don't like?

 

[martinnoweck]

if remember right shake can only handle 10bit-images in dpx-sequences - any quicktime movie will be 8bit.

regards,
martin

 

[Charles Angus]

So what do you see in Pro-Res that you don't like?

I took a short short film (~2 minutes) through the VFX process using uncompressed all the way, and using ProRes HQ. It was telecined direct-to-disk as 10-bit UC from S16 Vision 2 250D.

I felt I could push the UC stuff further in colour correction, and thought that the final result was a little smoother in the UC footage.

That (admittedly un-scientific) test sold me on ProRes as an offline format only.

 

[Charles Angus]

if remember right shake can only handle 10bit-images in dpx-sequences - any quicktime movie will be 8bit.

regards,
martin

It is supposed to work with 10-bit QT movies, but it doesn't seem to for me.

 

[Simon Blackledge]

Are these blackmagic 10bit or the latest fcp 10bit uncompressed?

s

 

[Andrew Walker]

I took a short short film (~2 minutes) through the VFX process using uncompressed all the way, and using ProRes HQ. It was telecined direct-to-disk as 10-bit UC from S16 Vision 2 250D.

I felt I could push the UC stuff further in colour correction, and thought that the final result was a little smoother in the UC footage.

That (admittedly un-scientific) test sold me on ProRes as an offline format only.

So you felt it could go further in the CC prosess...or it could go further. Big difference there. If you have some examples you could post that would be nice to see.

Personally I see no reason to go uncompressed. As we have all seen with Red footage and Red Ray that footage can be compressed and still look amazing and give you plenty of room to work with.

 

[jake blackstone]

So you felt it could go further in the CC prosess...or it could go further. Big difference there. If you have some examples you could post that would be nice to see.

Personally I see no reason to go uncompressed. As we have all seen with Red footage and Red Ray that footage can be compressed and still look amazing and give you plenty of room to work with.

In my personal experience, anything compressed, such as Prores codec is fine, if all you're doing is just primary color balancing. Anything else, such as secondaries or HLS curves, will only result in high level of noise. Also, it's almost impossible or very difficult to do any kind of selective keys for isolation of an area. There are some very high quality compressed codecs, such as Prores or DNxHD and yes RedRay, but they primarily designed to be VISUALLY lossless. They're not designed to be used for grading, as something like Red RAW, which designed to preserve as much color and luminance information with highest level of compression for the following post recovery process. So, there are no hard rules for choice of codecs, but for me personally, I always try to use uncompressed codecs, such as DPX for color grading.

 

[martinnoweck]

It is supposed to work with 10-bit QT movies, but it doesn't seem to for me.

you can import 10-bit QT movies into shake, but they will be processed as 8bit - that is what i have been told. if you want to have 10bit IN, 10Bit Process and 10Bit Out you have to take the DPX-Route.

kind regards,
martin

 

[Charles Angus]

Are these blackmagic 10bit or the latest fcp 10bit uncompressed?

s

It's the Apple 10-bit codecs. Same problem with the AJA codecs, I don't have the BMD codecs installed on this machine.

 

[Charles Angus]

In my personal experience, anything compressed, such as Prores codec is fine, if all you're doing is just primary color balancing. Anything else, such as secondaries or HLS curves, will only result in high level of noise. Also, it's almost impossible or very difficult to do any kind of selective keys for isolation of an area. There are some very high quality compressed codecs, such as Prores or DNxHD and yes RedRay, but they primarily designed to be VISUALLY lossless. They're not designed to be used for grading, as something like Red RAW, which designed to preserve as much color and luminance information with highest level of compression for the following post recovery process. So, there are no hard rules for choice of codecs, but for me personally, I always try to use uncompressed codecs, such as DPX for color grading.

Exactly.

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

If I may add to the compressed/uncompressed discussion: CineForm is the only compressed codec that I know well which works fine when ist comes to keying - ProRes surely does not.

Hans