Quote:
Originally Posted by BobbyBoberton
I was only messing around with the encoder for this portion because I found a post from someone saying that encoding in 10-bit vs 8-bit even if the source is 8-bit will compress better (assuming smaller file size is meant by this) without loss of quality with the exact same encoder settings, I haven't found this to be generally true, for the files I tried it on the 10-bit version was usually about 10-15MB larger but then I found if I turn on hevc-aq and use 10-bit pixel depth I get at least 25% smaller file sizes that do not look discernably better or worse than the larger file.
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This is not a good way to figure out this relation. You do not actually get the same quality with the same settings when you change the bitdepth. You are comparing files with different quality and different sizes, which makes it very hard to learn anything.
Ideally you would use a two pass encode while testing so the files were the same size and you can judge them on quality. To do this you also need to compress enough that you can judge differences in quality.
From forum user reports and my limited testing I believe that with x265 the difference in efficiency between 8 and 10 bit is not very significant, it is with x264 where you get a big improvement. However, 10 bit is still better and hardware decoding is much more common for 10 bit HEVC so it is also reasonably practical, unlike 10 bit AVC or 12 bit HEVC. I always encode to 10 bit HEVC, when I encode to HEVC, with 8 or 10 bit sources.