16bit per channel Avisynth

[Longinus]

Are there any plans to make Avisynth support 16 bit per channel, or perhaps even float? In RGB.

I ask this because I work with a lot of film matterial. Or digital content to be transfered to film. Most of the animations we create are in 16bits, and when I get some digitalized footage in cineon (10bit), I can never process them in avisynth.

Since I always work with image sequences, I use programas like Imagemagick to do the basic tasks (crop, resize, etc) as a batch. I hate to open Combustion or Digital Fusion to do something as basic as a resize.

Avisynth is an indispensable tool in a lot of things I do, but saddly not in high-end video.

I imagine higher bitcount would not be something difficult to implement, right?

[Wilbert]

Are there any plans to make Avisynth support 16 bit per channel, or perhaps even float? In RGB.
Yup, in AviSynth v3.0. Why float though?

[Zarxrax]

16-bit is great to hear, I'm greatly looking forward to avisynth 3.

I believe some high end applications support floating point color, and I've been told that even 16-bits just aren't enough in some cases. I don't know enough about that high end stuff myself though.

[Longinus]

Nice to hear that!!

I've never used float (that it's actually 32bit), and I don't think it's very commum to use it. The logistics to use it is beyond my hardware (HD space). One frame in 2K resolution (2048x1556), in TIFF, will take 36.4mb!! But the format exists. And of course I would use it if I had the space. I believe that for live-action footage, 32 bits is more than you need. But if you render 3D in 32 bits, you can get some REALLY, really smooth color gradients.

Anyway... 16 bits is good enough! =D

[Mug Funky]

32 bits is good for colour grading and exposure compensation, etc.

basically, anything involving "levels". it'd also be good to have float colourspace conversions, but that's probably a sledgehammer cracking an egg (10 bits should be enough for this).

but at least 10-bit support would be good, and another step closer to my dream of avs processing in realtime with SDI source (so far it's just nowhere near fast enough, esp. for standards-conversion).

CinePaint supports 32 bit float colourspace. but to realize the real advantage of float, you have to try out HDR images - this essentially means the colours don't go from say 0-255, but go anywhere between 0.0 and 2390781293487.93784239 or whatever you want. imagine a photograph of a sunny day where nothing is underexposed, and nothing is overexposed...

of course monitors can't display this, but it is a very good mode to work in for photo manipulation, not to mention it's usefullness for 3d (there's renderers out there that support 64bpc colour).

there was talk ages ago of avs 3.0 supporting higher bit-depths. i would love it if that happened.

[Longinus]

Another cool thing about HDR, that Mug Funky talked about, is that if you have a picture of inside a house, and you can see in a window the sky and sun shinning, you could reduce the brightness of the entire photography so that the house is in total darkness, BUT the sun would still shine outside... because of the higher degree of brightness it have.

And I've heard a lot of discussion that processing photo manipulation (levels, etc) in a higher color depth (even if the original is only 8 bit) and then reducing the output to 8 bit, is something that improves the quality!

[Mug Funky]

that may not necessarily be so - it depends on how much processing is done.

photoshop will dither from 16bpc to 8bpc. the dithering will increase percieved dynamic range, but at the cost of adding noise in the LSB. this will decrease the dynamic range slightly.

but for level correction, doing this can still help (esp if you supersample...). one thing i like doing is applying a photoshop port of LimitedSharpen to supersampled images, then downscaling them in 16 bits (max and min only work in 8-bit, and unfortunately layers require 8 bit too. stupid Adobe...)

[Longinus]

Yes, I agree..

The dither photoshop use is nice in some cases, but not always.
Photoshop 7 was even worse withg 16bits.. you couldn't do anything. CS is a little better. But still there is a long way to go.

[Mug Funky]

hehe... i use photoshop 7 still. IIRC the adobe CS stuff requires windows XP, which i refuse to install because it's simply too annoying to suffer (yes, i'm stubborn). there's just enough 16bpc editing functions in potatoshop 7 for it to be useful for raw image manipulation - namely feathered selections, clone/healing/patch tools and level correction/curves.

i'd be using CinePaint, but for some reason it wont work anymore (load a file = hang)

... this is SO off topic :)