Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

A tip for Better exports

There are many technical factors that make up a video signal, often one of the most neglected is Bit Depth.

Most video signals are comprised of 8bit colour channels meaning 8 bits of information per colour - red green blue. DV, HDV, XDCAM, DVCProHD are all 8bit formats.Generally speaking most editing systems will work in the same bit depth as the source footage but there are ways and advantages to having your NLE process video in a greater bit depth space than 8bit.

Allowing visual fx, graphics, titles and colour corrections to be processed in greater than 8bit space allows for greater data headroom, smoother results and more precision in the final exported image. Both FCP and Premiere Pro have options for just this expanded bit depth processing.

In FCP select your sequence in the project bin then click SEQUENCE > SETTINGS. On the VIDEO PROCESSING tab choose the tick box for 'Render all YUV material in high-precision YUV'.This will make your export renders longer and make FCP run a little slower but will give better results on projects using lots of effects and colour corrections.



Premiere is able to use up to 32bit on footage than can suppourt such high depths. Go to PROJECT > SETTINGS then select VIDEO RENDERING. There you'll find a tick box for MAXIMUM BIT DEPTH. This will let Premiere use the maximum possoble bit depth for each clip up to 32bit. As with FCP using this option will give better quality exports on projects that have a ot of effects at the expense of longer render times.

Posted at 12:00AM Jul 18, 2008 by Mike Jones in video  |  Comments[2]