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Processing at 32-bit float can work with shadow areas below 0.0 and highlights above 1.0, similar to 16-bit float, except with a much greater range of precision but also much greater memory and processing requirements.
Setting Color Depth in Fusion Studio
As we said earlier, DaVinci Resolve always processes at 32-bit float bits per channel; however, you can use less memory and still achieve more-than-acceptable results using the Performance Mode setting located in the User > Playback Preferences panel.
Fusion Studio automatically uses the color depth that makes the most sense for each file format. For example, if you read in a JPEG file from disk, then the color depth for the Loader is set to 8 bits per channel. Since the JPEG format is an 8-bit format, loading the image at a greater color depth
would generally be wasteful. If a 16-bit TIFF is loaded, the color depth is set to 16 bits. Loading a DPX file defaults to 32-bit float, whereas OpenEXR generally defaults to 16-bit float. However, you can override the automatic format color depth using the settings found in the Import tab of the Loader node’s Inspector. The Loader’s Inspector, as well as the Inspector for images generated in Fusion (i.e., text, gradients, fast noise, and others), has a Depth menu for 8-bit, 16-bit integer, 16-bit float, and
32-bit float.
The Loader’s Inspector Color Bit Depth settings
Configuring Default Color Depth Preferences
The default color depth setting forces the tool to process based on the settings configured in the Node Editor’s Frame Format preferences. These are used to set a default value for color depth, applied when a Generator tool is added to the Node Editor. There are three drop-down menus to configure color depth in the preferences. They specify the different color depths for the interactive session, final renders, and preview renders.
To improve performance as you work on your comp, you can set the Interactive and Preview depth to 8-bits per channel, while final renders can be set to 16-bit integer. However, if your final render output is 16-bit float or 32-bit float, you should not use the integer options for the interactive setting. The final results may look significantly different from interactive previews set to integer options.
The Frame Format Color Depth settings