Exporting ProRes: 8-bit or 16-bit option, even though 10-bit codec?

[nahd28342126]

Hi, I found some posts on this issue but no clear answers. I want to use Media Encoder to compress my Cinema RAW lite footage from 4k Raw 12-bit to 10-bit. But when I choose ProRes, which I understand is a 10-bit codec, the options I am given are 8bpc and 16bpc. And "Render at maximum depth". I don't want to add unnecessary file size by choosing 16bpc or "Render at maximum depth". Thank you!

[Samuel5CE0]

I'm a post supervisor at a production company that edits primarily in adobe cc. I'm not aware of any way to do prores lt/regular/hq at 10 or 12 bit... I have also been hoping adobe would address this. We generally use EditReady to transcode 10-bit xavc mxf files from the Sony Fs7 and Fx6 to prores 422 for intermediates because of this. I've never been able to get a straight answer on if setting to "maximum" or to 16 will add unecessarily weight to file size, or if media encoder senses that the max is 10 and renders out as such. I am interested an an answer to this as well.

Did you ever resolve this?

[lazylizzie]

I know this is an old post, but in case anyone comes across this: I can confirm that the bit depth render settings will not add any size to the exported file, as the bit depth and data rate of the final file is decided by the codec type and compression settings you have chosen, and these particular render settings are only relevant for the calcualtions during the render process before any encoding or compression occurs to create the final file.

If you want to convert footage from 12-bit to 10-bit and retain as much colour information as possible, then have both "Render at maximum bit depth" and "16-bpc" selected. If you don't have these settings on then the 12-bit footage will be rendered at 8-bit and then converted to a 10-bit file, so it would be similar to if you converted the 12-bit file to an 8-bit file, then brought it back in to AME and converted it to a 10-bit file. You'll lose colour info etc essentially.

I can also confirm that when exporting to ProRes from After Effects you will need to change the project settings to 16 bits per channel and the depth of the output module to "Trillions of Colors+" or the colours will shift due to conversion to 8-bit despite the fact the ProRes file will be 10-bit.

It's odd that Adobe hasn't made this more obvious when exporting to a 10-bit file format like ProRes, but for most people the extra rendering time may not be worthwhile if the final file will be an 8-bit MP4 anyway, so I assume that's why it's hard to find this info.

[trashcaneron]

I've really been trying to figure this out for a while and your post here, I think clarifies. 

In After Effects, I work in 16bpc. 

My delivery codec is almost always 4:2:2, which is 10bpc. 

If I don't select "trillions of colors" in my output module, then I get banding in gradients (because millions of colors is effectively 8pc)

In other words I need to oversample to 16bpc, which is then intepretted down to 10bpc. 🤯

[Garth5FFD · Accepted solution]

Yep, that's exactly right! I guess you could set your default output module to ProRes 422 and "trillions of colors" if you're always working in 16bpc and outputting 10-bit files.

The reason I discovered this is because I was trying to figure out why brand colours kept shifting in an Illustrator > AE > Premiere pipeline, and keeping everything 16-bit and exporting to ProRes4444 with trillions of colours was the only way to maintain the colours, despite the colours only being 8-bit anyway (in the 0-255 RGB range). Then I realised it must be because when exporting millions of colours to ProRes from AE, it then converts this from millions to trillions when encoding to ProRes and causes a colour shift — and some web searches and tests confirmed that's what was happening.