Intro to 32bpc in After Effects
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Loading ...Posted on: October 5, 2009
Posted in: After Effects, Video Tutorials
A quick overview of some of the basics of working in 32 bit float (32bpc) inside of After Effects
32bit float | Zero to One, and Beyond | All the range you need
In this tutorial we take a look at a few concepts you should understand when working with 32bit float images in 32bpc mode in After Effects. We take a look at things like dynamic range, colour fidelity, motion blur, and realistic compositing.
If you have any comments or questions, please, feel free to ask!
Thanks!
Advanced Multi-pass Compositing
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November 12th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Hi,
this is a nice introduction to the 32-bit Mode in Ae. Thanks man. What I would like to now is what you think about a linearized working space and to enable linear blending in the projectsettings? I use it very often but somehow I only have good results with this when I turn colormanagement off inside AE…Is there something to take care of?
November 13th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Hi there,
I generally don’t work in linearized space in AE, even though, that’s technically the more correct way of working… The only time I work in a fully linearized workflow is when I’m working with film scans, and then, I’m generally working in Fusion.
If you’re doing broadcast, and are not working with a team of 20 people, it’s probably ok to just work normally. The advantage to working in a linear colour space in a group setting is you know that everyone is working the same, so you can retain some consistency.
November 28th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I just added a link to this tutorial in a comment on this page of After Effects Help:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS81984DEB-D195-4822-9A06-EA0D00A0ECC7.html
I think that people reading that page will benefit from coming to this tutorial of yours to see the visual examples that you provide, which do a good job of showing the differences between the various color depths.
December 12th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
wow, I’ve been using 8 bit mode for years. I never knew what I was missing. Great tutorial.
May 1st, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Great tutorial!
But i have a question.
You show these examples of using 32 bits in images that provides 14 bits? Or how much?
Also if I have a footage which has 8 bpc (the most common) does it change anything if I color correct it in 32 bits?
It won’t provide so much information as your example because it doesn’t have so much information
And finally, if I work in 32 bpc how should i export it?
Thank you for reply and for tutorial, really helpful!
June 6th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
conr4d – I wanna know the exact same thing(s) as you – have you found answers yet?
June 6th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Hey Alek and Con4d,
If you’re doing some serious colour correction and manipulations of 8bit images in a 32 bit colour space, you will definately see advantages to working in 32 bits. The main advantage you get is that you won’t clip whites or blacks, if you happen to push colours over those values. You’re not going to have any magical new range in the image, but at least your manipulations will have more headroom to work with.
If you’re going to export a 32bit image, the best way to do that is with a .exr file. Some TIFF formats also support 32bits, but it’s just safer to stick with EXR since it’s a standard file format that pretty much every application supports.
Hope this helps!
June 7th, 2010 at 3:03 am
Hi Kert,
thanks very much for your quick reply – it really helped!
You mention exporting to EXR – what about if you’re exporting video?
June 7th, 2010 at 7:06 am
Hey Alek,
There’s no video format out there that supports 32bit floating point. The moment you want to compress to a quicktime, or some other AVI format, you’re going to clipping the data usually to 8-bit in the end. There are some codecs that support 10bit quicktimes, but I think they require special hardware (like blackmagic cards etc.)
June 7th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Thanks Kert – u da man!