CompuServe Messages

Tim, >> Pardon my stupidity, but what would you use this for? << large gradients on film can quickly use up the available 256 levels of _luma_, in particular, available with 8-bit. It's not so bad in video, but on film with 2000+ lines you'd see some banding. For example, if you had an obliquely angled light across a surface done in CG and it was a full screen effect, you don't have any more the 256 levels at 8-bit to adequately represent the falloff of light from bright to dark. 10-bit log would have more than enough to levels to deal with this situation and avoid banding. 10-bit (logarithmic) is supposed to be equal to 14-bit linear which would give 16384 levels of luma for this situation. I think the idea would be to keep scans at better than 8-bit throughout the process (import – render – composite – export). This is apparently possible according to Martin Doudoroff, since video post works at 16-bit per pixel internally. If you need to use Elastic Reality I think might be out of luck. BTW, I'm by no way an expert on this. I'm just breaking new ground for me and I think it would be beneficial to discuss the issues. The above information is loosely paraphrased from discussions with other MetroLight people who have quite a bit of film output experience and also from the Cinesite documentation. Martin