I'm a colorist. I spend all day looking at color intensely with very expensive monitors. It makes me really excited to see people who actually care about color reproduction over things like resolution.
With that said, I have to ask why these groups are interested in 10-bit when I'm essentially certain they cannot view in 10-bit. Only workstation GPU's (Quadro and FirePro) output 10-bit (consumer GPU's are intentionally crippled to 8-bit) and I can't really think of any monitors that have 10-bit panels under about $1000 (though there are many with 10-bit processing which is nice but doesn't get you to 10-bit monitoring). There are some output boxes intended for video production that can get around the GPU problem, but by the time you've got a full 10-bit environment, you're at $1500 bare minimum which seems excessive for most consumer consumption.
So I guess what I'm asking, are these groups interested in having 10-bit because it's better and more desirable (and a placebo quality effect) or are they actively watching these in full 10-bit environments?
It's worse than that; the input itself is only 8-bit and they scale up, and then back down again to 8-bit on the output side.
But it works, for the same reason that audio engineers use 64-bit signal pipelines inside their DAW even though nearly all output equipment (and much input equipment) is 16-bit which is already at the limit of human perception.
If you have a 16-bit signal path, then every device on the signal path gets 16 bits of input and 16-bits of output. So every device in the path rounds to the nearest 16-bit value, which has an error of +/- 0.5 per device.
However if you do a lot of those back to back they accumulate. If you have 32 steps in your signal path and each is +/- 0.5 then the total is +/- 16. Ideally some of them will cancel out, but in the worst case it's actually off by 16. "off by 16" is equivalent to "off by lg2(16)=4 bits". So now you don't have 16-bit audio, you have 12-bit audio, because 4 of the bits are junk. And 12-bit audio is no longer outside the limit of human perception.
Instead if you do all the math at 64-bit you still have 4 bits of error but they're way over in bits 60-64 where nobody can ever hear them. Then you chop down to 16-bit at the very end and the quality is better. You can have a suuuuuuuper long signal path that accumulates 16 or 32 or 48 bits of error and nobody notices because you still have 16 good bits.
tl;dr rounding errors accumulate inside the encoder
> 16-bit which is already at the limit of human perception
Nitpick: 16-bit fixed point is not at the limit of human perception. It's close, but I think 18-bit is required for fixed point. Floating point is a different issue.
> If you have 32 steps in your signal path and each is +/- 0.5 then the total is +/- 16.
Uncorrelated error doesn't accumulate like that. It accumulates as RSS (root of sum of squares). So, sqrt(32 * (.5 * .5)) which is about 2.82 (about 1-2 bits).
> You can have a suuuuuuuper long signal path that accumulates 16 or 32 or 48 bits of error and nobody notices because you still have 16 good bits.
Generally the thing which causes audible errors are effects like reverb, delay, phasors, compressors, etc. These are non-linear effects and consequently error can multiply and wind up in the audible range. Because error accumulates as RSS, it's really hard to get error to additively appear in the audible range.
tl;dr recording engineers like to play with non-linear effects which can eat up all your bits
> > 16-bit which is already at the limit of human perception
> Nitpick: 16-bit fixed point is not at the limit of human perception. It's close, but I think 18-bit is required for fixed point. Floating point is a different issue.
16-bit with shaped dither should be good enough to cover human perception.
This is the same reason try and keep post production workflows at 10bit or better (my programs are all 32bit floating point). A lot of cameras are capable of 16bit for internal processing but are limited to 8 or 10bit for encoding (outside some raw solutions). An ideal workflow is that raw codec (though it's often a 10bit file instead of raw) going straight to color (me working at 32) and then I deliver at 10bit from which 8bit final delivery files (outside of theatrical releases which work off 16bit files and incidentally use 24bit for the audio) are generated. So all that makes sense to me.
I was mostly curious why people were converting what I assume are 8bit files into 10bit. The responses below about the bandwidth savings and/or quality increase on that final compressed version seem to be what I missing!
> With that said, I have to ask why these groups are interested in 10-bit when I'm essentially certain they cannot view in 10-bit.
The H.264 prediction loop includes some inherent rounding biases and noise injection. Using 10-bit instead of 8-bit reduces the injected noise by 12 dB, which makes a noticeable difference in quality-per-(encoded)-bit, even when the source and display are both 8-bit. I spent some time talking with Google engineers early on in the VP9 design process, and they commented that they had done some experiments, but did not see similar gains by using higher bit depths with VP9. I don't know if that's still true with the final VP9 design, though.
I am far from an expert on the matter, but i recall the case was made that acceptable color reproduction could be achieved with lower bitrates by using 10-bit encoding. It was about file size, i don't think anyone in the fansubing community expected people to have professional monitors.
>With that said, I have to ask why these groups are interested in 10-bit
I can explain that - I wrote an extensive post on this matter a year back, so I'll just reuse that with a bit of tweaking. So with that clear, let's talk about the medium we're working with a bit first.
Banding is the most common issue with anime. Smooth color surfaces are aplenty, and consumer products (DVDs/BDs) made by "professionals" have a long history of terrible mastering (and then there's companies like QTEC that take terrible mastering to eleven with their ridiculous overfiltering). As such, the fansubbing scene has a long history with video processing in an effort to increase the perceived quality by fixing the various source issues.
This naturally includes debanding. However, due to the large smooth color surfaces, you pretty much always need to use dithering in order to have truly smooth-looking gradients in 8-bit. And since dithering is essentially noise to the encoder, preserving fine dither and not having the H.264 encoder introduce additional banding at the encoding stage meant that you'd have to throw a lot of extra bitrate at it. But we're talking about digital download end products here, with bitrates usually varying between 1-4 Mbps for TV 720p stuff and 2-12 Mbps for BD 720p/1080p stuff, not encodes for Blu-ray discs where the video bitrate is around 30-40 Mbps.
Because of the whole "digital download end products" thing, banding was still the most common issue with anime encodes back when everyone was doing 8-bit video, and people did a whole bunch of tricks to try to minimize it, like overlaying masked static grain on top of the video (a trick I used to use myself, and incidentally is something I've later seen used in professional BDs as well - though they seem to have forgot to properly deband it first). These tricks worked to a degree, but usually came with a cost in picture quality (not everyone liked the look of the overlaid static grain, for example). Alternatively, the videos just had banding, and that was it.
Over the years, our video processing tools got increasingly sophisticated. Nowadays the most used debanding solutions all work in 16-bit, and you can do a whole bunch of other filtering in 16-bit too. Which is nice and all, but ultimately, you had to dither it down to 8-bit and encode it, at which point you ran into the issue of gradient preservation once again.
Enter 10-bit encoding: With the extra two bits per channel, encoding smooth gradients suddenly got a lot easier. You could pass the 16-bit debanded video to the encoder and get nice and smooth gradients at much lower bitrates than what you'd need to have smooth dithered gradients with 8-bit. With the increased precision, truncation errors are also reduced and compression efficiency is increased (despite the extra two bits), so ultimately, if you're encoding at the same bitrate and settings using 8-bit and 10-bit, the latter will give you smoother gradients and more detail, and you don't really need to do any kind of processing tricks to preserve gradients anymore. Which is pretty great!
Now, obviously most people don't have 10-bit screens or so, so dithering the video down to 8-bit is still required at some point. However, with 10-bit, this job is moved from the encoder to the end-user, which is a much nicer scenario, since you don't need to throw a ton of bitrate for preserving the dithering in the actual encode anymore. The end result is that the video looks like such an encode on a 8-bit (or lower) screen, but without the whole "ton of bitrate" actually being required.
So the bottom line is that even with 8-bit sources and 8-bit (or lower) consumer displays, 10-bit encoding provides notable benefits, especially for anime. And since anime encoders generally don't give a toss about hardware decoder compatibility (because hardware players are generally terrible with the advanced subtitles that fansubbers have used for a long time), there really was no reason not to switch.
Most consumer sources are also-limited to 8-bit precision. 10-bit encodes from these are made using a fancy temporal debanding filter, which only works in certain cases.
Keep in mind that there is a range expansion when converting to monitor sRGB. Also several video players now support dithering. So the debanding effect can often be quite visible.
Also, x264 benefits from less noise in its references, which means 10-bit gets a small compression performance bump.
Didn't know anime enthusiasts have an interest in 10-bit video, but I've always thought it's a great shame most consumer camera codecs are limited to 8 bits.
I have been waiting for h265 to surface in consumer cameras, and hopefully at 10 and 12 bit depths as options. Even if current monitors don't do 10 bits, there is so much information you can pull out of the extra data.
Many camera sensor chips can output 10 or 12 bits, it's a shame it doesn't get recorded on most cameras.
Hopefully Rec2020 on TV's and new blu ray formats will also push cameras.
Well, this was not the first time they adopted something early and left most of the world behind: widespread adaptation of the ogm then the mkv containers, followed by the complete swap to h264 over XviD, and I believe the abandoning of "must fit either onto a CD or DVD exactly" ripping and encoding rule was also a first.
> I'm essentially certain they cannot view in 10-bit. Only workstation GPU's (Quadro and FirePro) output 10-bit (consumer GPU's are intentionally crippled to 8-bit)
That's not what NVidia says:
"NVIDIA Geforce graphics cards have offered 10-bit per color out to a full screen Direct X surface since the Geforce 200 series GPUs"
I can't find any details on the Crossover, but the Achieva is an 8bit panel with FRC to attain effective 10-bit. It's not true 10 and I wouldn't recommend using it in a professional setting (benchmark being a true 10bit panel with usually 12 bit processing such as Flanders Scientific http://www.flandersscientific.com/index/cm171.php).
And while NVIDIA does output 10bit on GeForce, it's limited to
> full screen Direct X surface
which means no OpenGL (a must with pro apps). I suppose it might be possible to use a DirectX decoder in your video player to output 10bit video but I haven't heard anyone doing it or tried myself.
All that said, I was originally talking about consumer facing 10bit, so the monitors are probably a valid point. As someone who cares about color reproduction, I hope to see more of that - especially as we move towards rec2020.
With that said, I have to ask why these groups are interested in 10-bit when I'm essentially certain they cannot view in 10-bit. Only workstation GPU's (Quadro and FirePro) output 10-bit (consumer GPU's are intentionally crippled to 8-bit) and I can't really think of any monitors that have 10-bit panels under about $1000 (though there are many with 10-bit processing which is nice but doesn't get you to 10-bit monitoring). There are some output boxes intended for video production that can get around the GPU problem, but by the time you've got a full 10-bit environment, you're at $1500 bare minimum which seems excessive for most consumer consumption.
So I guess what I'm asking, are these groups interested in having 10-bit because it's better and more desirable (and a placebo quality effect) or are they actively watching these in full 10-bit environments?