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Who will break the interenal 10 bit hybrid barrier?


Jimmy
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My money was on Lumix/Panasonic to bring 10bit recording to the GH5... but it seems the DVX200 is only 8 bit, will they better their new prosumer model? Canon/Nikon seem unlikely to be first to push new tech and Sony seem to be staying put with 8 bit. Feels like the dream of 10bit in a DSLR/Hybrid is still a long way off.

10bit seems to be the last big sticking point. We are seeing 4K, we are seeing log, we are seeing incredible ISO... Yet 10 bit is probably as important a feature as any.

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I always thought the chipset would have more work to do compressing to 8bit than 10bit? Any tech heads here?

No that is not correct. bit depth is not considered "compression". You just throw away the data. Similar to downsampling an image. 

While is true that compressing more requires more work, compressing a 10bit footage for the same bit rate as an 8bit will require more work (more compression). You would need to increase the bit rate of the 10bit footage before your computational power equates that of the 8bit. 

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I remember there were rumors of Samsung and ML collaboration. Any news on that? 

Rumours were true they did reach out but not sure much came of it, they also reached out to me over a book but nothing came of that, I think they are just scouting / testing the waters really. They did a great job on the NX1 let's hope they can now do a great job on a raw shooting full frame camera ;)

By the way if 10bit is the 'holy grail' even when compressed, why isn't everyone on this forum shooting 14bit? :)

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My understanding was Samsung and ML talks were limited to control and display functions; but with the NX1 SDK out (which, again "as I understand" as I'm not a developer) is just for camera control functions, that may not be of much interest to ML who has focused a lot on improving bit rates and adding things like zebras.

Wondering when we'll start seeing the end products from that SDK.

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They did a great job on the NX1 let's hope they can now do a great job on a raw shooting full frame camera ;)

Don't tease us like that. 

By the way if 10bit is the 'holy grail' even when compressed, why isn't everyone on this forum shooting 14bit? :)

I do enjoy our theoretical discussions... 

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Guest Ebrahim Saadawi

10bit is far from the holy grail. Just try it if you have a GH4 and any external recorder or even a decent HDMI monitor. 8bit vs 10bit is an extremely minimal difference in real world shooting, 10bit still bands greatly. 

Or even easier, if you want to try it scientifically, shoot a raw image with any stills camera you have, save one to 10bit and one to 8bit and compare. 

It's not as big as people make it seem, not even close. From 12bit to higher you start seeing a real world difference in the subtle colour variations. 

I believe companies are sticking with 8bit due to this reason, because the trade off in quality is far less visible than the trade off in file sizes, it's a great compression algorithm. 

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Rumours were true they did reach out but not sure much came of it, they also reached out to me over a book but nothing came of that, I think they are just scouting / testing the waters really. They did a great job on the NX1 let's hope they can now do a great job on a raw shooting full frame camera ;)

By the way if 10bit is the 'holy grail' even when compressed, why isn't everyone on this forum shooting 14bit? :)

200mbps 10-bit is a far cry from uncompressed 14-bit DNG for file sizes and workflow. 

It seems to me with storage prices plunging lower and lower, double the files sizes for quadruple the tonal precision seems like a fair middle ground between 8-bit 4:2:0 and uncompressed Godzilla files. It's not "the holy grail"--no one said that but you--but it is a noticeable increase in quality. Funny how you put down the importance of higher color depth after spending an entire article beating on the NX1 for not being as good with color as your 4:2:2 camera. 

My money is on Samsung or Panasonic. The other important question is whoever puts a full sized HDMI out on their body. No, really. I think a lot of users don't even consider the 10-bit of the GH4 because micro HDMI is so breakable and easy to slip out during a take.

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10 bit is a huge, huge leap... If the GH4 is still banding, then they must have screwed up their implementation or someone screwed up their tests.

10bit + a proper log is a very, very good balance of image quality and file size/workflow.

I agree. An 8bit/channel image has ~16M colors whereas an 10bit/channel ~ 1000M. 

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    Or even easier, if you want to try it scientifically, shoot a raw image with any stills camera you have, save one to 10bit and one to 8bit and compare. 

 

Reworking 1 still image from a raw file to 8 and 10 bit files.... and compressing video to 8 bit and 10 bit are two very different things.

This is why jpgs on a DSLR are far better than a framegrab. There is time to properly map the 14 bits to 8 bits.

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Magic Lantern already did... 14 bit raw. Medal goes to them.

I could be wrong here, but my understanding is that this is possible because there is 'no' compression going on. Not to mention they are dealing with a larger body and I assume a larger heat sink. My feeble understanding of this topic is that, at this point, getting full frame 4k 10bit out of a small mirrorless dslr body is faaaar more difficult than getting full frame HD raw out of a large mirror dslr body. I'm not suggesting that the 8bit/10bit won't be used as a barrier between prosumer and pro products, because it probably will. But I don't think Sony could deliver 4K 10bit in that body even if they wanted to. 

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