HD image quality, bit depth & Final Cut Pro HD

I'm doing some research on FCPHD/Shake/ as a possible replacement for big-iron SGI hardware editing/compositing software I'm currently using for HD work. Typically we shoot 1080i HDCAM, with onlines incorporating a fair amount of sequential-frame CG with all the usual needs: Grown-up color correction, tracking, roto'ing, keying, etc.

I'm being told (By my local FCPHD dealer no less) that even if I capture my HD using say, Black Magic Design's 10 bit quicktime codec, that as soon as I hit the render button, even for a dissolve, FCP truncates the image to 8 bit.
If this is true, then you'll end up with a timeline that's 10bit, 8bit, 10bit, 8bit etc dropping to 8 bit every time the playhead passes over some some rendered FX.
Can anyone confirm this?

Further, take a look at this:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93794
In it, Apple acknowledge that FCP messes with gamma when importing sequential images. Wow.

How do people deal with colorspace issues when importing After Effects (always RGB) sequential images into FCPHD (YUV) edits?

Usually I work in uncompressed RGB, to avoid color-space, sampling and bit-depth issues and I'm trying to find out exactly what these "uncompressed" codecs (like BlackMagicDesign's 10bit quicktime) actually do to the image.

Apologies if all this has been covered before...

Many Thanks
Chris

Chris,

You would be best to post this question on the Blackmagic and/or AJA Kona forums. These two places have company contributers who can give you the straight scoop. Kona2 is the hot item right now for cost-effective HD.

Generally FCP works best if you stay within the same codec. If you are working on the same station, then AE or Shake or Motion pulls a QT file and can read the same codec as FCP. Thus, something captured with a BMD or Kona codec is a readable file to any other app on that station or any other station with these codecs installed.

Where FCP falls down is in mixing color spaces. For instance, drop a TIFF file into an uncompressed YUV timeline and you don't get correct results when you render, depending on your timeline processing settings. You actually get better results if you use QT Pro to turn the TIFF into a QT file with matching codec and then import that into FCP. It's these sorts of things that can have you chasing your tail at times. FCP also has pretty marginal scaling, so if you intend to work with oversized images or do DVE moves, you will get better results in AE or Red.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com