Working with 10 bit footage - pipeline

[John Br]

Hi all, I might get a 10-bit capable camera, (Wee) but I am wondering since most everything I work with (Youtube, Social Media) is 8-bit, should I edit the footage in a 10-bit timeline and render it in 8-bit, or render it in 10 bit and let the platform deal with it?

In other words:

should my footage be 10-bit, my post-production be 10-bit, and map the output to 10-bit,

or

should my footage be 10-bit, my post-production be 10-bit, and map the output to 8-bit,

or even

should my footage be 10-bit, my post-production be 8-bit, and output to 8-bit,

Thank you very much for your insights!

[R Neil Haugen]

The big thing that capture in bigger bit depths gets you is the ability to do more color correction without artifacting the image. So capturing in 10 bit, then exporting 8 bit to YouTube/Vimeo/Whatever is rather common.

You don't set the bit-depth for the sequences in Pr. It works with the bit depth of the files as far as the internal math is concerned. Bit-depth agnostic, I guess you could say.

Neil