What's 720 x 576 x 24.

Action wrote on 1/29/2008, 2:40 AM

I'm working in PAL DV Widescreen, 720 x 576.

Everythings fine but when I look at the clips properties it says 720 x 576 x 24. Question is what's the 24 refer to, anyone know? Thx.

Comments

Tim L wrote on 1/29/2008, 3:46 AM

24 is 8-bit color: 8 bits x 3 channels (red, green, blue).

With some media (uncompressed video, or png stills, etc.) you may see 32 bit color. This adds a fourth channel for "alpha" -- the transparency of each pixel. In this case, each pixel has four 8-bit values: red, green, blue, and alpha. The alpha value for each pixel indicates how transparent or opaque it is.

Tim L

OhMyGosh wrote on 1/29/2008, 10:12 AM

Hi Tim,
8 bits (1 byte?) sure doesn't sound like much color. Is that for the preview, or the actual video? What about 24 or 32 bit truecolor. What are they for? Is Vegas limited to the number of colors it can display? Are there settings on the camera or in the program to give better or more colors? Does the alpha channel make a big difference since it would control the shades of the other colors? Thanks. Cin

Chienworks wrote on 1/29/2008, 10:39 AM

"Truecolor" is 24 bits total, 8 bits for each of the primary colors red, green, & blue. This allows 256 shades of brightness for each color for a total of 16,777,216 different colors. That's quite a few.

Action wrote on 1/29/2008, 7:58 PM

Thanks guys.

OhMyGosh wrote on 1/31/2008, 9:52 AM

Thanks Kelly. I guess if I can't make it look good with 16,777,216 colors, 16,777,217 won't help ;P Cin.

Chienworks wrote on 1/31/2008, 11:12 AM

Especially keeping in mind that if you want 16,777,217 colors you'll need 9 bits per pixel. They don't make 9 bit systems, so the next thing available is 10 bits. That allows 1,072,741,824 colors.

The first digital video editing software i ever used was a program i wrote myself on an Apple //gs. It had a 4 bit palatte that allowed a maximum of 16 colors. The frame size was a whopping 80x50, and i could achieve a frame rate of about 15fps. I had no hard drive, but i could store about 20 seconds of video on an 800KB floppy disk. Of course, it took about 10 minutes to load the video into RAM and about 15 minutes to save it back to the floppy. Wooooooo, heady times indeed! Who needs Vegas after all?