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In the last couple of movies, we have answered the question what is HDR color.
In this movie we are going to answer the question, why is HDR so stinking cool.
I am going to have this Bit Depth and HDR project open here and I am going to
Alt+Click this Bit Depth value down here at the bottom to get into 32 bits per
channel mode and with my text selected, I am going to go over here to my white
swatch. In the last movie, we kind of fiddled around with giving this a super
red value. But, actually we want to take this much farther.
So I am going to take green to 2. I am going to hit Tab and take blue to 3. So
we basically have full white, basically red at full blast and then we have
green at 2 times the full blast, and blue three times the full blast. I hit OK
and at first you might be disappointed looking at this, thinking well, that
looks exactly like white to me, who cares? Well, the difference comes when we
start using 32 bit effects. Here I have color balance selected, and you
can see there is 16 here in the Effects and Presets panel letting us know
this is a 16 bit effect. In another words, it has the capability to operate in
16 bits per channel mode. But, if I select an effect say for example, like Fast
Blur, you can see that there is a 32 next to this, meaning this effect works
at 32 bits per channel. That's its level of processing.
It obviously works at 8 and 16 bits as well, but it also works at 32, and
that's the magic. So I am going to apply Fast Blur here. Now, just by way of
contrast, I am going to go over here to the Project panel and change this back
to 8 bits per channel just very briefly. Now, as I blur this, it operates just
as you think it would. That just kind of give it just a generic blur, nothing special.
So now if I go to the Project panel, and I am going to get back into 32 bits
per channel mode, and I am actually going to select my text just to make sure
that we are still working in HDR color ranges. Actually, let me take this back
to 2 and 3 very quickly and now, as I increase these 32 bits per channel fast
blur, you will see what the difference is. Oh! Look at that. Oh! Look at that.
You see what's it's doing is that this white is so full of extra light, that
when we start fading out and blurring this white just like we did in regular 8
bit mode, that the red kind of blur is away and the green and blue lights are
more bright; they kind of hang around and this operates just like white would
in the real world. So imagine trying to create a neon sign with just the
regular After Effects tools. It's a little rough. Why not use this great color
mode which behaves like natural light anyways. This is just an amazing effect
and once you get this trick under your belt and understand the way HDR color
works, what you can do with After Effects to create naturalistic light stuff is
just unbelievable. We are going to be revisiting this again when we look at
Fractal Noise and at few other times throughout this training series.
In the next segment, we are going to look at something called Linear Blending
and Linear Blending kind of goes along with HDR a little bit. You don't have to
be in 32 bits per channel mode in order to use it. However, it does make light
work in a more realistic, natural way. So let's say you are going to output this
text right here with this cool glow at 32 bits per channel and you want to export
this to a movie format that you know is only 8 bits per channel, so like a
QuickTime movie or something. Don't think that you cannot take advantage of this.
If I were to render this now as a QuickTime movie, yes it would still be 8 bit.
But, it converts this to look like its 32 bits. So this is almost exactly
what the look would be. It wouldn't go back to being the 8 bit blur that we saw
before, it would look like this. So feel free to work in 32 bit. It is going to
slow you down a little bit, but it can be worth the trade-off as is the case
obviously with this text. So you don't need a 32 bit per channel camera
or original source footage in order to take advantage of this amazing aspect
of color and After Effects.