[ancientworldnow]

This is the same reason try and keep post production workflows at 10bit or better (my programs are all 32bit floating point). A lot of cameras are capable of 16bit for internal processing but are limited to 8 or 10bit for encoding (outside some raw solutions). An ideal workflow is that raw codec (though it's often a 10bit file instead of raw) going straight to color (me working at 32) and then I deliver at 10bit from which 8bit final delivery files (outside of theatrical releases which work off 16bit files and incidentally use 24bit for the audio) are generated. So all that makes sense to me.

I was mostly curious why people were converting what I assume are 8bit files into 10bit. The responses below about the bandwidth savings and/or quality increase on that final compressed version seem to be what I missing!