Let me rephrase my thought: In the same search at videolan, I though I saw 8, 10 (may be 12) bit_depth sse2 and/or avx optimizations for SATD calculation.
My question is then: No matter what the original video clip bit_depth is, could you use a “simplified” 8, 10 or 12 bit temporary version of the clip for the motion estimation? (reusing the x265 SATD asm optimizations)
Edit: By the way, thanks for the explanation