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Hi all,

thought I'd get the ball rolling with this one. So, HDR, who's grading in HDR? What are you viewing on, (monitors and domestic)?How similar is it to your rec709 pass?

what are client reactions and expectations?

Thanks, Asa 

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I can not share first hand experience, but at least some observations I made at IBC this year:

There was a panel where the technical VPs of the big studios discussed HDR and WCG (wide colour gamut). They projected some A/B examples of standard P3 digital cinema and Dolby Vision.

They told that until now, they graded the SDR main delivery first, and then asked the filmmakers and colorists to do the HDR/WCG version after that as a trim pass. They agreed, that none of the filmmakers disliked the 'bigger canvas'. But they also agreed that the filmmakers were probably less courageous with the new technology, because they already found a pleasing SDR look for their film and did not want to alter it too much. The goal should be to do the HDR/WCG version first and trim passes for the SDR deliveries.

I enjoyed the examples that they showed a lot, but I also noticed two things:

- 108 nits in the cinema is nice, but not as impressive as some people might expect. Basically it is just around one additional stop in the highlights. Way more interesting are the increased details in the shadows. 

- technical issues with the footage like noise get boosted a lot. There is definitely less range for us to deal with footage that was exposed suboptimal ;). DPs will have to work more precise, until the next generation of camera sensors might improve the situation again. 

 

Walking around the exhibition floor, HDR was THE THING this year. But looking at all these displays one could easily get the impression, that HDR means: an extremely saturated picture with ugly clipped highlights, that is very bright. Nice looking examples were rare.

About displays: In my opinion the Sony X300 seems to be the best choice for HDR mastering at the moment. 

 

Hope to hear about more hands-on experience in this thread...

So long, Andy

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Very interesting Andy. Wish I could have been there. So I started an HDR pass of Ex Machina yesterday. Nice if the distributor to ask us, (Brooklyn and Victor Frankenstein were graded elsewhere and as far as I understand started from scratch). 

I started by matching the rec709 on the HDR Sony 300 but then felt that there was little point in someone buying an HDR version if it looked exactly the same, after all HDR TVs can be set to rec709. So I increased the gain to add some pop. I think you're correct that the HDR will become be the primary grade but this will only make the rec709 pass more frustrating. 

Thanks, Asa 

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Thanks for sharing Your first experience, Asa. Yeah, I think a bit more pop makes sense, and in my opinion one of the important things about HDR is to get more definition in the specular highlights and shadows. But I guess the tricky part is that bright objects do not get too distracting. But I guess that Ex Machina with its dark and also landscape sequences will look even better. 

Are You working from your original Baselight scene, so that You can adjust the old layers? Or do You have to work with the rendered out master, which would be quite difficult I guess... ?

Edited by Andy Minuth
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Yes going from Baselight scenes so can adjust everything. And you're so right that whilst we can have more highlight detail it can be rather distracting so I don't see us taking off too many shapes or keys just because technically we don't need them in HDR. In fact I've windowed a few more lights because they started to ping out too much. 

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Ive done quiet a bit of testing comparing HDR (HLG) to SDR, we wanted to really get to grips with limitations or forseen problems right down from post to transmission.

The first thing we noticed that when your grading on a X300 in sdr its limited to 100nits, and so when you switch to an HDR mode you notice that increase in brightness and contrast ratio.

But what was interesting was when we were viewing the same material on consumer screens (LG) what we were somewhat confused by the lacklustre HDR we were seeing compared to a side by side SDR comparison; consumer screens don't limit their SDR to 100nits so when we measured the screen the peak brightness was 380nits , so when switching from SDR to HDR you didn' get that "wow" jump in brightness. 

This may only be a problem if theres a simulcast show where the viewer decides to jump from SDR to HDR (or vice versa) to compare the difference between the two standards.

 

From a WCG perspective we couldn't of been happier - for live sport we noticed we were seeing that overly saturated parts of the picture in 709 - which may have been clipped had the headroom to exist in the image. But when i was grading in 2020 i didn't feel the need or desire to really push the saturation that dramatically, unless the style requested it i still wanted to keep things fairly natural. But it was handy with somethings such as plants and flowers that can sometimes sit right on the edge of 709.

I will say is that when i was grading scripted drama  i found that  some highlights needed extra special attention in darker scenes they became more distracting.

Also you might want to consider lowering the luma on any captions a smidge

Edited by Mark
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Hi Mark,

very interesting about the luminance on domestic sets not being limited to 100nits. Our head of tech mentioned that he's heard from consumers that because you can adjust contrast and brightness on domestic TVs in SDR but not when set to HDR mode, the HDR can appear duller than the SDR grade. I was recently sent examples of 4 feature films from a major studio in both SDR and HDR and was shocked at how far they are pushing the HDR. Rather than simply matching the SDR and using the extra headroom for  the highlights they were brightening the whole image so that highlights were around 80-90% of the 1000nits. Even night scenes were pushed extremely bright. 

What's your grading platform?

Many thanks, Asa 

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Thats it exactly Asa,  at least with the firmware builds we've been testing hdr on the consumer screens are limited to the settings you can change, the "Cinema" mode seemed to be the default which i suppose makes sense,

I was in another facility last week where they were looking at a SDR - HDR conversion and seeing where the pit falls were for doing something like this on a existing delivered master.

We spent some time going through some scenes and found that the most important thing is not straying to far from the intended artistic intent. 

So whilst we the test clips we were playing in were converted from 709 to 2020 we matched the saturation and let the HDR follow a similar route.

We chose not to push everything just because we could, but instead let it sit naturally and compliment the look and style of the test clips, whilst at the same time expanded the speculars.

Its worth noting that the clips we looked at were shot and graded beautifully so we didn't have to deal with issues of clipping or crushing.

It was an interesting test to see from a broadcast perspective if a HDR service could be complimented with SDR material rather than having to exclusively request HDR programming and commercials for example

Our internal testing was mainly been  on Mistika due the benefits of its open time and robust toolset, we're now also looking at HDR on Basleight.

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