10-bit and a flatter profile are most useful when the scene is difficult or when you intend to grade. They give you more room for corrections and smoother gradients than heavily baked-in 8-bit footage.

But they are not free quality. If you expose badly or do not want to grade at all, a good standard profile can produce a better-looking result faster.

I use standard color for family/travel footage that needs to be online the same day. I switch to 10-bit flat/log for snow, sunsets, mixed forest light and projects where footage from several cameras has to match.

The biggest advantage for me is not making the image “cinematic”; it is having more room to fix highlights and color differences without the image falling apart as quickly.

On Windows you have several options. Resolve is the obvious choice if color grading is the center of the project. VSDC is useful when you want the grading tools inside a broader lightweight editing workflow: LUTs, white balance/exposure controls and current HDR/10-bit support are available, while the same project can also handle action-camera telemetry and proxies.

Whichever editor you use, build a repeatable conversion: input profile → technical LUT or manual normalization → exposure/WB → creative look. Randomly stacking LUTs is where flat footage often ends up looking worse than the camera's standard profile.

That helps. I was treating 10-bit/log as a quality switch that should always be on. I will use it when I know I have time to grade or when the lighting is difficult, and keep standard color for quick-turnaround clips.