Thanks,
so this leads to more questions.
We can now get 10 bit from our DB decks into Vegas, I'm hoping that Vegas reads the full 10 bits worth of data, applies FXs using float and then truncates to 8 bit for writing?
Should this be something better than just truncating, is some form of dithering appropriate here, sorry just my knowledge of things audio kicking in, don't know how that applies to video.
Which kind of leads to the next question, why can't Vegas write 10 bit data, assuming it's reading more than 8 bits, doing the calcs at much higher accuracy etc it would seem a very minor change to the code to be able to write to 10 bit uncompressed AVIs.

And one final question, SDI comes in two variants, SDI and SDTI. I'm told that video transferred over SDI incurs some loss, SDTI is lossless. In fact DV25 over 1394 is superior to SDI in terms of loss. Can anyone flesh that out a bit more or even point me to where I can get a more indepth understanding.

We've got many J3s with SDI and a DVW 250 with SDI, do all of these have SDTI, will the J3s feed 10 bit and will the DVW 250 record 10 bit assuming we could feed that to it?
Bob.

You can put 10-bit video on the Vegas timeline using a 10-bit codec such as the excellent Blackmagic codec that comes with the Decklink cards (that's what I'm using for this).

Straight cuts remain 10-bit of course, but unfortunately Vegas cannot output 10-bit video from effects etc. I don't know exactly why, it just may not have occurred to them to implement this. Internal calculations are done at a higher precision, but no way it's float.

You can still color correct in Combustion (up to 32-bit arithmetic + float precision), this is the same primary color corrector as in the high end tools that won them a technical Oscar.

Synthetic Aperture's Color Finesse also does the job and adds secondary color correction.

Wondering about 6cc (the six-vector color corrector for Vegas), could that guy in Sweden be persuaded to do 10-bit? Hint, hint...

SDI is a protocol [and interface] for sending uncompressed video (specifically 10-bit 4:2:2 YUV) over a serial digital connection. This means that if you are transferring compressed video, you need to first uncompress and then recompress at the other end, which will result in some quality loss.

SDTI was created to solve this problem. It uses SDI as a "data pipe" with a code that indicates the video type. The codes currently cover DVCPRO, DVCPRO 50, Digital-S, Betacam SX, DVCAM, and MPEG-2 Program and Transport streams. In this case, there is no compression and recompression.

So, yes even DV25 will look as good over SDTI as over 1394 :O)

You may need an SDTI card for your J3s.

The DVW250 records 10-bit through its SDI interface, but no SDTI. In this case though, the 2:1 compression is VERY low loss.