I really wanna correct this: If you plan on doing Depth of Field or Motionblur in post, it's essential to have Superwhites, which only work in 32-bit, otherwise the Bokeh from DoF and Lightstreaks from MoBlur will have the wrong color and the wrong brightness.
I (also) really wanna correct this...
16 bit float exrs ("half float") save values between 65504.0 and 5.96^–8 (
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch26.html) . So "superwhites" wise, this is more than you'll probably ever need. The important thing is precision here. For nearly everything 16 bit float (not integer) is enough. color, lighting, gi, reflections doesn't matter, it's precise and fast enough for compositing tasks. The only real exception here are world position and zdepth passes - since those can easily go beyond those values AND need to be very precise. You may not see it right away but if you use a wpp to displace the rendering you see the precision difference between 16 and 32 bit float.
If you don't Plan on doing DoF or MoBlur in Post (eg. 16-bit exrs), there is no reason to go EXR in the first places, due to compatibilty issues, that may arise. PNG deliver the same color info with less space wasted and a saved color profile. And combining multiple passes in one EXR often screws with Aftereffects. If you are on Nuke, exr's are preffered. If you only Photoshop or AE, just stick with dem bloddy PNG's.
PNG does not deliver the same information. Png ist not linear (so if you want to do any image operation on it you will have to linearize your image first and that means you have already lost a good amount of information). PNG also does not save anything above 1.0, so as soon as you have some overbright pixels you're f*****. I also don't see embedded color profiles as an advantage, but this is another story.
I'm not using multichannel exrs with AE, so I can't say anthing to that. Photoshop is different - since ps is neither able to work linear nor respect gamma of alphas or able to do predivision you're lost anyways, no matter which format you're using...
« Last Edit: 2015-02-10, 18:08:29 by DeadClown »
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