10 Bit Color without a Break Out Box

[Will Keir]

Heard El Cap has giving OS X 10 bit color.

Could this finally mean it's possible to grade in Resolve with 10 bit color without having a dedicated breakout box?

Can I plug a 10 bit display into the Display Port or HDMI 2.0 Port and color away? At least close to finish color accuracy?

I realize the signal from OS X El Cap is likely 10 Bit RGB instead of 10 Bit YUV. I don't know what this means exactly though.

Isn't a 10 bit signal better than 8 bit at least? So it's a step up if nothing else?

Monitor recommendations? Specs I'm looking for? I see a lot of 10 bit panels out and TVs that could possible be a reference monitor.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

If I am not mistaken, the latest version of Resolve 12 does support 10 bit on El Capitan. Might want to verify that, though.

 

[Craig Parkes]

10 bit monitoring doesn't help you in terms of accuracy when it comes to the accuracy of your monitor - it only helps you when it comes to responsive of feedback when you are doing color correction.

10 bit monitoring means you will be able to see subtle changes in color correctly, which means that you are getting a more accurate depiction of the color so if you boost the yellow in an image you will know more accurately how it impacts the skin tone across all gradations of color in the face.

However, 10 bit RGB monitoring is only useful if you are targeting a reference output with a calibrated monitor. 10 bit RGB is great if you are targeting sRGB or Adobe RGB - so you will have finer control over color correction targetted for viewing on a computer screen, tablet or phone. But given that there is a huge lack of standardisation in this space, and those devices EXPECT to see YUV encoded video within a Rec 709 color space by and large, you would be targeting for something that no one else is targeting for.

Targeting for 10bit YUV Rec 709 isn't technically difficult or really even that expensive these days. It's an old standard (as in that there are a lot of devices now that blow Rec 709 gamut out of the water - an iPhone 5 exceeds Rec709 significantly) but that is actually a good thing for a target, the more devices that can exceed the range of colors represented by the standard, the more likely it is that your content will display correctly if targeted at the standard (assuming they have got their YUV - RGB conversion correct, which again, most modern devices should do). It will also mean that your content will display correctly on correctly setup devices that expect a YUV Rec709 compliant signal (most HDTV's).

10 bit RGB monitoring is great if you are doing VFX and are part of a larger workflow where you want to be able to check your work more accurately so you know that someone who will be manipulating it further down the chain isn't going to encounter something funky.

10 bit RGB monitoring is helpful if you are aiming at P3 color space (as a way to feed say a P3 capable projector) but you aren't going to be doing that through displayport or some other consumer connection anyway currently so again, for professional coloring purposes it currently doesn't offer much use at this time.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Could this finally mean it's possible to grade in Resolve with 10 bit color without having a dedicated breakout box?

10-bit means nothing if the display is not calibrated and if it's crappy. Even if it's a 5K Retina display, the panel uniformity, color accuracy, freedom from defects, black level detail, viewing angle issues, and all the other myriad of monitor quality parameters will doom it to look like any $500 5K computer display. A computer display is not a grading monitor. It's going to lie to you.

And unless you're looking at a color-managed output outside the operating system -- where you can't adjust brightness or gamma or anything else -- you won't know if something has changed between yesterday and today. Outside the operating system, you have a fighting chance the monitor could be accurate and will stay accurate. There is no cheap way to do this. My opinion is also that an iMac is not a useful machine on which to color-correct 4K or 5M camera material, mainly due to the sacrifices Apple made in the GPUs.

 

[sam karr]

Is a Eizo CG247 + ultrastudio mini monitor the cheapest not too crappy solution for a imac?