16 bits per channel rendering

[Bischofftep]

Hello, all!

I've been nagging about this for awhile, and since I'm recently returning to Blender to help out with some work I thought I'd bring it up again.

I'm doing some video editing that involves highly accurate color correction: namely editing in 16 bits per channel RGB. When dealing with large images and subtle coloration changes you can quickly get into banding issues when you're stuck at 8 bits per channel (aka 32 bit RGBA), but the additional headroom afforded by 16 bits per channel (aka 64 bit RGBA) eliminates these problems for larger renders.

I believe I recall seeing that the internal math is done either in floating point space or 16 bit space, and so I would love to see a selector for "8 bit" or "16 bit" color!

Many thanks for considering,

----
Doug Bischoff
Ceridwen Productions

[MadMesh]

That would be a great feature. But it means that Blender will need to support a file format that can handle 16 bits channels as wel.

[z3r0_d]

That would be a great feature. But it means that Blender will need to support a file format that can handle 16 bits channels as wel.

the tiff format does support 16 bits per channel, but blender doesn't exploit these features [probably because quicktime is used for tiff support, and quicktime will only deal with 8 bit images, it converts 16 bit tiffs into 8 for blender [does blender ask for them that way?]]

[joeri]

I thought OpenEXR was/is on the todo list. Patients is the keyword.
http://www.openExr.org

[madmac]

I thought OpenEXR was/is on the todo list. Patients is the keyword.
http://www.openExr.org

Hehe, I just wrote one this weekend - currently it is inside a Blender 2.36 source build, and has only been tested on Linux - I could need some help on how to make this available to others: Shall I go the way over Tohupoo, or somehow submit a patch to the official Blender tree ?

[Bischofftep]

Go Official Blender, I beg you! Let me at it!



Seriously, anything that gives us a more professional level of control is highly desirable. Thanks for your work!

-Bischofftep