. Sound & Filmmaking: Bit Depth How bit depth will effect your films sound quality Bit Depth Sample rate is the measurement of how frequently we measure the audio. Bit depth on the other hand is how accurately we measure that sample. To help you better understand bit depth let’s create an imaginary measurement situation. Let’s imagine that you need to measure the height of your best friend. Now let’s say that all you have to do the measurement with is a baseball bat. You quickly figure out that you friend is exactly 2 baseball bats tall. However, when you perform this exercise on another taller friend you have to “round down”. This second friend is actually two and a half baseball bats tall. Unfortunately you have to measure him at either 2 or 3 baseball bats tall since you can’t use a half bat as a measurement. With the “bit system” you have 2 common methods of measurement. First there is the 8 bit system which has 256 levels. Quiet sounds are recorded at level 1 and loud sounds are recorded at 255. Your sound therefore can only have a range of 256 levels. There is no measurement for a sound that registers at 145.5 or 77.3. They would simply be recorded as 145 and 77 respectively. As you can see this poses a problem with measurement accuracy. However, there is another bit system which is called the 16 bit system. This is the most common bit system in most video cameras. The 16 bit system has 65,536 levels. This allows filmmakers to measure sound more accurately since they have a wider range of measurement gauges. This allows for a more precise measurement of sound. It should also be noted that increasing your bit system from 8 bit to 16 increases the amount of data that needs to be stored. Together, your sample rate and bit depth combine to create what we call the `resolution´ of a digital sound recording.   Continue Below... The Importance of Sound & Audio in Film What is Dynamic Range? Sound Frequency The Role of Equalizers Sample Rate Bit Depth       .

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