Alister Chapman - What does High Dynamic Range mean in the world of video production?

Yeah...I always HATE watching my efforts to preserve dynamic range get crushed away by television screens.

It will be a great day when higher D.R. TV sets are widely owned. I give that about 10-20 years still. (Widely OWNED, not widely SOLD.)
 
DPStewart said:
Yeah...I always HATE watching my efforts to preserve dynamic range get crushed away by television screens.

It will be a great day when higher D.R. TV sets are widely owned. I give that about 10-20 years still. (Widely OWNED, not widely SOLD.)
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I think there are simply two interpretations of DR out there: The one concerning luminance, measuring for example the one of TV screens - and DR concerning the information retained in highlights and shadows, which for me is the important one. It doesn't matter how bright my screen is (always if it's set up in good condition like a not too bright room) - if I can see the structure of the clouds and the information in the shadows. That's why a camera with 13 or 14 stops of DR will always look better than a camera with 9 or 10 stops, even on a screen with only 6 stops of DR. It's all about information, not brightness. Don't mix the two aspects, which can become confusing.
 
DPStewart said:
... It will be a great day when higher D.R. TV sets are widely owned. I give that about 10-20 years still. (Widely OWNED, not widely SOLD.)
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IMO, Chapman is correct in that your run-of-the-mill Best Buy type TV departments will have (mostly) HDR 4K sets before the 2016 Christmas shopping season.

OLED isn't quite there from the price perspective but even that is slowly moving toward the meat of the market. LG is making a major push here and, if the Chinese economy slows down even further, a lot of these will end up in the US.

http://news.yahoo.com/lg-display-focus-investment-oled-next-generation-push-073204692--finance.html

A piece on the AMOLED displays.

http://en.ofweek.com/news/AMOLED-industry-shifting-from-rigid-to-flexible-33126

And more AMOLED - 1st 6" 4K from EverDisplayOptics, largely for the VR sets.

http://phandroid.com/2015/08/07/4k-amoled-display/
 
Input DR (the DR of the camera you use for recording) and output DR (the DR of the device you use for viewing) are different things. Which is not necessarily a problem because there's a grading process in the middle.

I want people to watch my stuff on their screens and see it looking just as good as when they watch Game of Thrones, or a BluRay of their favorite movie. Their screen is what it is. I have to worry about the DR of the camera I use. Which, as of today, with my a7S shooting slog2, is about good enough: it's the non-camera-related part of the production that is not up to par.
 
Samuel H said:
Input DR (the DR of the camera you use for recording) and output DR (the DR of the device you use for viewing) are different things. Which is not necessarily a problem because there's a grading process in the middle.

I want people to watch my stuff on their screens and see it looking just as good as when they watch Game of Thrones, or a BluRay of their favorite movie. Their screen is what it is. I have to worry about the DR of the camera I use. Which, as of today, with my a7S shooting slog2, is about good enough: it's the non-camera-related part of the production that is not up to par.
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The difference is HDR sets will reproduce wide dynamic range detail with full contrast. The range of values from black to white on HDR sets will be close to the full ten stops of DR that current video codec standards cover. Typical LCD/LED sets only reproduce abour 5 stops of actual light output between white and black, so you have to flatten contrast a lot to retain more than 10 stops of detail.
 
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/11G052963-001.htm?ref=yfp

Envivio (NASDAQ: ENVI), a leading all-software video processing, delivery and monetization solutions company, and Dolby Laboratories will combine the power of Envivio Muse™ Live Ultra HD video processing software with Dolby's Dolby Vision™ solutions to showcase the ultimate entertainment experience: Ultra High Definition video with vivid High Dynamic Range (HDR) at IBC in Amsterdam.


For the first time, the combination of Dolby Vision, Dolby® AC-4 and Envivio real-time encoding solutions is possible.

At IBC a feed will be encoded in HEVC along with the HDR information by Envivio Muse Live UHD in real-time and played back on a 65" Dolby Vision compatible 4K television.
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HDR as it's being talked about here is not just contrast ratio nor luminance. It all goes back to the EOTF (electro optical transfer function) called PQ for perceptual quantizer. These are the inventions of Dolby. PQ has been adopted by SMPTE as ST-2084, HDR10 the HDR base layer of ultra Blu-ray, bt 2086 the spec for HDR signaling meta data, all are subsets of Dolby Vision. ST-2084 relates sensor voltage to visible light, a departure from the rec 709 which relates to a crt display from 1931. Accordingly, display peak brightness is essential to the transfer function. Until you've seen the PQ transfer function on display, you'd be advised to withold comparisons to brightness or contrast ratios because it's a game changer not only in contrast, but in how color saturation is maintained in the highlights. The overall contrast of an image could be similar to rec 709 but specular highlights will be more realistic and properly color saturated. PQ is a reallocation of bits to represent the image, and requires 10-12 bit depth to avoid banding.

DaVinci Resolve includes ACES ODT's for grading HDR with PQ, P3 color and 1000, 2000 or 4000 nit (cd/m^2) display targets. HEVC level 5.2 also supports 10 bit 4:2:2 and 2086 signaling meta data, master display reference includes the RGB primaries, white point, average contrast level and maximum contrast level.

HDR is very exciting, and the subject we should be talking about as film makers. The displays are arriving, the content is arriving from Fox and Warner Bros. It represents in my opinion, a more significant benefit than 4k was, or than 8k will be, because the benefit can be appreciated from any viewing distance or screen size. Our cameras are already capable of this, it is only the willingness to embrace the new grading techniques and workflows that is required.
 
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