Color Depth

Hi,

I am trying to figure out how to determine the color depth of a pores file.
I have a ProRes 422 (HQ) file, I know that the format is 10-bit regardless of the source color depth.

I would like to determine if the video color depth that was used to create the ProRes file was 8 or 10 bit.
Since there is no flag or metadata that i am aware of that will tell me this, I am guessing the only way i can do this is to look at how much color information is in the actual file.

I am new to Resolve, can it be used to determine this? or indeed is there any other way to determine the color depth of a Prores file?

Many thanks
Tak.

like to determine if the video color depth that was used to create the ProRes file was 8 or 10 bit.

What you are asking is how to determine what the bit depth was of a source file that was re- or trans-coded into a ProRes container?

If you know what the original codec was, that might provide some hints, for example DV would be confined to 8-bit, plus there would be color-sampling limitations like 4:2:0 overlaying the compression.

If you had the material in Resolve and could expand the luminance and chrominance ranges (and pump up the saturation and gain) you might see sample-banding happen sooner in 8-bit sources. Very often its fairly obvious that there is a lot of source values missing, even in a fairly detailed scope display -- the vectorscope representation will look like a cross-hatched screen-door. That means that those quantized values just don't exist.

Otherwise a transcode masks what the original bit-depth was.

jPo

If is like to ask which liquid is inside a given bucket: it could be water and it could be sand for what we know.

You can kind of guess if you have an external scope and you look at the expanded blacks: sometimes you can see horizontal banding in the luminance.

The internal scopes are not precise enough IMO

I can generally detect "blocky" vectorscopes in 8-bit video, even with the Resolve internal scopes. But it is technically possible to create 4:2:2 10-bit video.