I'm working on an HD job and the flame artist
is requesting that the final images be rendered
in cineon format to avoid some banding that we are seeing
with the 8 bit ( .tga ) files that we have been working
with.

However, having never rendered in cineon format
I'm a bit unsure about the proper settings. Right off,
when I change the file format from .tga ( or .pic ) to
cineon the rendered images appears extremely bright ( when
viewed in mplay)

Can I assume that this is just a limitation of mplay ….
and the final images will be fine? …or do I need to tweak
other settings ( gamma, etc.? ) to achieve the desired look?

Is there another format I should be rendering to that will give me
an image of 10 bit or higher?

You can render 16-bit tiffs which will give you something more than 10-bits. Where you enter the filename in the ROP, change “Infer from Filename”, to “TIFF” and then click on the arrow button to the right of that. This should give you an option to pick which tiff output file format. While you're at it, if you don't plan on loading this image into Photoshop, I recommend using Standard Deflate compression method.

I know very little about Cineon but it also has these concepts which determine how its displayed:
- black/white points which
- LUTs
I have no idea how you would go about determining what the right values are. To set these in mplay, they're under Options > Settings.

Thanks Edward …sounds like a good idea.

I did a quick test and it seems that if I render in the 16-bit tiff format
(which displays correctly) and then convert it to a cineon image
in COPs ……..the resulting frame seems to match the cineon image
rendered directly from the render output.

This helps, because the safest bet appears to be rendering
16-bit tiff. However, come Monday morning, if the flame guy
just has to have cineon format, then I think I have a quick path
to get there without a complete re-render.

Thanks again for the advice. Very helpful.