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# 8- and 10-bit VTR Archiving

A VTR archive can contain 8- or 10-bit clips—although all clips in the archive must have the same bit depth. When archiving 8-bit material to 8- or 10-bit VTRs, the clip metadata remains in an 8-bit format.

You can archive 10-bit material to 8- or 10-bit VTRs. However, when archiving 10-bit material to an 8-bit VTR, you reduce the quality of the archived material. A warning message appears notifying you of the downgrade. 10-bit clips archived to 8-bit format are flagged as such in the archive. Similarly, when archiving 12-bit material to 8- and 10-bit VTRs, a warning message appears, and the 12-bit clips are flagged in the archive. You cannot restore downgraded clips to their original bit depth.

Before archiving to any device in Smoke, you can perform archive size estimation. See Estimating Archive Size. Before proceeding, make sure you have enough tapes ready. You can perform size estimation before archiving to a filesystem to make sure you have enough space on disk.