I commented off hand that if you're desperate enough you can get higher bit depth from merging frames together if you have access to 50, 60p etc. Oh, this also works if you downscale a higher resolution to a lower one within a higher bit depth space as well - so for all you people down scaling footage, if you're able to do that in a 16-bit space and save a high bit depth format then you'll have something to gain. I didn't speak for practicality, only that it can be done.

When I wrote my program to count unique colours in very large resolution 16-bit tiff images, I didn't see other software that'd do that. As the array would require tremendous memory. If you want to know the way I managed to do it I had a simpler way to do it which required processing power over memory, and that was to sort the pixels in an array from smallest colour value to highest essentially, that way you could simply not add +1 to the unique colour count if the same colour appeared more than once in a row.

I had other reasons for doing this, it's part of my experiments with image stacking, but I've done it with various image sources, scans, jpegs from shitty cameras with no raw, raw, jpegs from better cameras, snap shots of two frames in video.

Been told it's "cant be done" many times. Because the information from one from to the next isn't the same - well no, that's exactly why it works, even in the worst case scenario of a tripod locked off shot of still life with nothing moving it works.

But if you're recording 50p, blending every 2 frames together just speeds the footage up to 25p, the average of the two frames still contains the same amount of motion blur/movement as recording in 25p at the same shutter angle, though it may be divided into 2 sections over the 1 frame instead of 1 long section of motion.

Generally that shouldn't be an issue as 180 degree is accepted as general purpose good shutter angle which leaves space between the movement/motion blur anyway, and if you wanted none you could shoot 360 degree.

Now to the screenshot - R, G, B bit values, these represent how much of the scale Red will use on it's own (regardless of what green and blue is attached to - the same goes for Green and Blue etc), a value of 6-bits would mean, the image only has 64 differing red values in total. I made this to identify problems with some images.

Unique Colours is the total number of colours, an 8-bit image has a maximum value of 24-bits here, but that would be very hard to achieve, as it would have to have every combination of colour, hue, intensity, saturation in the one image etc from bland to neon, and the image resolution would need to be 16.7 million pixels or over.

The Unique Colour Factor - A 1920x1080p image has 2,073,600 pixels in the frame, a value of 50% would mean it would have 1,036,800 unique colours in the image, this percentage can be used as a factor of colour quality and separation.

The first example is a single frame grab from some A7s (720p 120fps) video I downloaded off the net (I was going to use my GH2, but I left it at work this afternoon), it's placed into Photoshop and converted to 16-bit and saved as a tiff (partly to rule out any conversion to 16-bit as the contributing rise in bit depth counting, and also because the program I wrote only reads 16-bit tiffs at this time of writing).

The second example, is the first 2 frames in 16-bit mode in photoshop, blended with opacity at 50% for the top layer, flattened and saved as a tif.

The fourth is the same but with 4 frames.

As you can see, the more you stack, the more in between values with higher precision than 8-bit arise, about ~9x the unique colours.

It should only be logical, even if the video or two photos is of on a tripod of a still life, 2 pixel values will have variance in them over the two frames, especially since 8-bit has high quantisation error compared to higher bit depths, variable noise, micron image movement etc, so if you have one that's 241 and 240 for example, the in between value cannot be represented in 8-bits.

Unfortunately I'm working tomorrow, but that means I can get my camera back before Monday, so I probably can shoot some footage with the lowest contrast settings and see if I can induce banding in something and post up an actual video sample.

enjoy.

http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/113331-red-epic-x-5k-camera-tear-down