Communigate Pro AE-List@media-motion.tv Message 62001

Render settings are intentionally separate from the output module settings.

Ae renders the comp according to the render settings, then passes those frames to the output module(s), which handle cropping, resizing and compression. You can have more than one OM on each render item with different settings, which is a very useful feature in many different workflows.

Working in 16b or 32b and outputting an 8b format will force Ae to dither upon output. This can help reduce banding in some circumstances, versus working and outputting in 8b only.

walter soyka ▼ keen live

walter@keenlive.com

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 7:15 PM, Adam Mercado <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

Thanks guys. The way AE handles all this is uncharacteristically unintuitive. Because in the Render Settings you can select your bit depth. Then in the Output Module you can select your color depth. And the two are mutually exclusive. At least they don't 'connect' when you might expect.

I almost always work in 16 bit and always render out to 16 bit for all the aforementioned reasons. Today I noticed for the first time while setting up a render that there is an option for trillions of colors. I wasn't sure if this was for 16 or 32 bit color, or some other arcane use. I chose trillions and my PSD sequence was 12MB a frame compare to the 16 bit million color 5MB frame.

So now my assumption is that the Render Settings flatten the layers into a 16 bit render, saved into RAM perhaps, which then gets written to file as an 8 bit image if millions of colors is used? Does this downsampling help at all? Or is one just wasting their time rendering to 16 bit if the file only gets written as 8 bit. Or does the file automatically use the higher bit/color depth if it supports it, ignoring the trillions/millions setting?

Thanks
Adam

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