Setting Bit Depth

There are four places to set the bit depth of your work:

• Footage operator
• Composite operator
• Bit Depth Converter operator
• Render Queue dialog (and other rendering dialogs)

These places correspond to points in the flow of image data in a project: input, mid-stream, and output.

You start with the bit depth of footage initially set by the file format. In the Footage operator, you can choose to change the bit depth.

The various pieces of footage used for layers in a composite can each have a different bit depth. The composite can change the bit depth.

As you work on footage (for example, a layer of a composite), you can add a series of operators like the Keyer and Color Corrector. You can promote and demote bit depth mid-stream using the Bit Depth Converter operator. So, for example, you can increase the bit depth before performing a precise color correction and then decrease it afterward.

Finally, you can change the bit depth when you render images; you can set the bit depth in the Render Queue dialog or Commit to Disk dialog.