Floating Point vs. Brooadcast Safe?
by Alex Kuzelicki
on
Jun 17, 2007 at 3:07:50 pm
Hi,
I have another question about Floating Point that is puzzling me.
For broadcast, it's great that you can have these 'whiter than whites' and 'blacker than blacks'but, in the end, aren't you going to have to scale all the values back anyway to make them broadcast safe?
... or am I just misunderstanding the whole issue?
If anyone could post a simple workflow for using Floating Point that is 'broadcast safe' that would be great.
Re: Floating Point vs. Brooadcast Safe? by Darby Edelen on Jun 17, 2007 at 6:48:03 pm
[Alex Kuzelicki]"For broadcast, it's great that you can have these 'whiter than whites' and 'blacker than blacks'but, in the end, aren't you going to have to scale all the values back anyway to make them broadcast safe?"
You're correct in that the 32bpc/floating point color won't be carried into the rendered file. However, you're never explicitly seeing the overbrights in the composition anyway, anything above 1.0 (white) gets clipped to 1.0 for display. The difference is that if a pixel has a value over 1.0 it will change the way that pixel is composited in the scene. A bright light (say a value of 5.0) when blurred or motion blurred will give a much 'hotter' more realistic result, all of the pixels displayed will still reside between 0.0 (black) and 1.0 (white), but the compositing will be more natural. To summarize, 32bpc is color range used for compositing, not display.
The final render will be an 8bpc file (or maybe slightly more depending on the codec you use) with all of the values ranging between 0 and 255. If you need the final render at 16-235, I believe you can get away with dropping your 32bpc comp into an 8bpc render comp with a Broadcast Safe (or Levels) filter, I can't test that right now as I don't have access to AE.
Darby Edelen DVD Menu Artist Left Coast Digital Aptos, CA
