Comments on: Intro to 32bpc in After Effects

By: Alek

Alek — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 02:51:21 +0000

Thanks Kert – u da man!

By: Kert Gartner (VFX Haiku Admin)

Kert Gartner (VFX Haiku Admin) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:06:25 +0000

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.)

By: Alek

Alek — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:03:23 +0000

Hi Kert,
thanks very much for your quick reply – it really helped!
You mention exporting to EXR – what about if you’re exporting video?

By: Kert Gartner (VFX Haiku Admin)

Kert Gartner (VFX Haiku Admin) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:07:22 +0000

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!

By: Alek

Alek — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:53:48 +0000

conr4d – I wanna know the exact same thing(s) as you – have you found answers yet?

By: conr4d

conr4d — Sat, 01 May 2010 21:08:39 +0000

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!

By: sample007

sample007 — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:43:58 +0000

wow, I’ve been using 8 bit mode for years. I never knew what I was missing. Great tutorial.

By: Todd Kopriva

Todd Kopriva — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 20:15:38 +0000

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.

By: Kert Gartner (VFX Haiku Admin)

Kert Gartner (VFX Haiku Admin) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:44:10 +0000

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.

By: illd

illd — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:51:32 +0000

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?