Current HDR status of the art for UW video

I thought of giving an update on HLG and HDR in general

While cameras exist that are able to capture HLG in 8 and 10 bits there are still many issues in post production

1. Monitors: there are only professional grade devices that accept HLG and of course your TV that is not the best for video editing. 

2. Application support HLG is supported by DaVinci FCPX however as there are only HDR displays you either convert to PQ or Rec709. The latter means no HDR left.

3. OS support Windows 10 supports HDR10 MAC OS X supports both but you have the issue that for HLG you need a dedicated video output device and no external GPU supports HLG currently

In summary as cameras capture in HLG and video editing really only works in HDR-10 the only left option is to shoot LOG formats that have no colour space and edit in HDR-10

So if you are not shooting LOG you are better off shooting 10 Bit Rec709 and avoid all the headaches I have had!!!

There has not been any substantial step forward for HLG in the last year but the gaming industry is making sure HDR-10 is progressing fast and there are several Display HDR 400 600 and 1000 monitors on the market

Edius NLE supports PQ/HLG since version 9. 

Actually, reading Edius forums, NLE is only a small part of the game. Monitor, BM card, hdmi signal.

ATM HDR is a rich man's game.

But watch it change rapidly. It's not going away

It's interesting tech and in years to come (how many is the question) we will probably be shooting everything that way without ever questioning the tech, the how's, the why's.

Everything will catch up.

It may take another 10 years but the day will come when it will be rare to find a TV in someone's home that does not do HDR. Will it be 5 years until its hard to find a monitor for grading that does NOT have HDR onboard? 

When will Rec709 be a thing of the past? How long before Rec2020  is the norm...the way its just done ?

Get your color (important) right and your exposure right (more room to adjust than with color) and you are good with HLG. Shoot it, do small changes in an NLE that supports it (don't they all?) and play it on your TV. That is what it was designed for. Use it for what it was intended to do and it works. 

Monitors: If you are a professional buy the tool, if not calibrate your TV and you are good. If you will be delivering in SDR why bother anyway.

It works fine on Resolve. Output through a BM card to your HLG capable tv and you are good to go. At least on MAC.

Happy HDRing  

1 hour ago, Lionfi2s said:

Get your color (important) right and your exposure right (more room to adjust than with color) and you are good with HLG. Shoot it, do small changes in an NLE that supports it (don't they all?) and play it on your TV. That is what it was designed for. Use it for what it was intended to do and it works. 

Monitors: If you are a professional buy the tool, if not calibrate your TV and you are good. If you will be delivering in SDR why bother anyway.

It works fine on Resolve. Output through a BM card to your HLG capable tv and you are good to go. At least on MAC.

Happy HDRing  

Blackmagic Ultrastudio HD does not support HLG as it only provides HDMI 2.0a so it is limited to HDR10 and won't support HLG. 

My Sapphire Nitro Vega 64 enclosed in my Razer X though supports HDMI 2.0b as well as displayport 1.4 both supporting HLG

For practical reasons though I would not want to move around my eGPU close to the Tv so in practice you work in Display-P3 also because no HDR Tv supports more than that anyway

The key issue of HLG is tone mapping majority of people do not have a display with good coverage of Display P3 in fact except Macs most PC are more versed to sRGB

The key issue for computing is that HDR is driven by gaming not by video editing and in that case colour space is NOT important just brightness is in fact in the specifications above DisplayHDR400 you have a a WCG wide colour gamut but you are not mandated to specify what that is. So a display with sRGB and min max brightness 0.4 and 400 fits the scope (in stops this is around 10 stops)

A display with HDR600 will typically have DCI-P3 but still no HLG

https://displayhdr.org/certified-products/

So now there are plenty of HDR compatible displays that do not support HLG because they are not Tvs 

4 hours ago, Lionfi2s said:

Get your color (important) right and your exposure right (more room to adjust than with color) and you are good with HLG. Shoot it, do small changes in an NLE that supports it (don't they all?) and play it on your TV. That is what it was designed for. Use it for what it was intended to do and it works. 

Monitors: If you are a professional buy the tool, if not calibrate your TV and you are good. If you will be delivering in SDR why bother anyway.

It works fine on Resolve. Output through a BM card to your HLG capable tv and you are good to go. At least on MAC.

Happy HDRing  

Would be great if it would be that easy. Unfortunatly it isnt. I had done just that, invest in an expensive  BM card, hook it to a TV etc. Here it start:  No standard commercial TV is properly calibrated to really use it to judge proper HDR grading. What looks good/correct on that particular TV may look horrible if you play the final clip back on another TV.  

Its pure guesswork unless you invest in a proper HDR grading monitor. And these are still very expensive. Also the latest Macs are by far not HDR capable. They call it „extended color range“ which is a marketing gimmick for a bit wider range than 709. But its certainly not „proper“ HDR.

And unless you use a RED or other big tool for your underwater filming, your HDR stuff is likely to look much worse than anything you can get in ole Rec.709

I have yet to see a HDR clip produced on a GH5, Sony HDR capable consumer camera or similar that convices me that these cams can produce good looking Rec2020 clips underwater.

I wonder what the Sigma fp may give us in this regard with firmware updates as time goes on? We may need to wait for version 2 of the fp for that..??

Times are a changing. We moan about this and that missing but compared to say, 10 years ago, things are just amazing today.

15 hours ago, John Doe II said:

I wonder what the Sigma fp may give us in this regard with firmware updates as time goes on? We may need to wait for version 2 of the fp for that..??

Times are a changing. We moan about this and that missing but compared to say, 10 years ago, things are just amazing today.

John the camera I think is not the key issue right now

This is an example HLG video I use it for snorkelling some shots have the camera focus hunting a bit as I had a relatively long lens and was not expecting the dolphins to get that close

Watch on your HLG Tv is graded in Final Cut Pro X on a HDR-10 monitor

Thanks interceptor,

I dont have a HLG TV. my TV is a 2014 LG that in reality is a 2013 model be because it takes do long to get new hardware in this part of the world.

I do have plans to get a projector though. But then projectors are not bright enough (in my price range)

On 12/12/2019 at 4:10 PM, bubffm said:

Would be great if it would be that easy. Unfortunatly it isnt. I had done just that, invest in an expensive  BM card, hook it to a TV etc. Here it start:  No standard commercial TV is properly calibrated to really use it to judge proper HDR grading. What looks good/correct on that particular TV may look horrible if you play the final clip back on another TV.  

Its pure guesswork unless you invest in a proper HDR grading monitor. And these are still very expensive. Also the latest Macs are by far not HDR capable. They call it „extended color range“ which is a marketing gimmick for a bit wider range than 709. But its certainly not „proper“ HDR.

And unless you use a RED or other big tool for your underwater filming, your HDR stuff is likely to look much worse than anything you can get in ole Rec.709

I have yet to see a HDR clip produced on a GH5, Sony HDR capable consumer camera or similar that convices me that these cams can produce good looking Rec2020 clips underwater.

Agreed, if the other tv is not calbrated to the same specs it will look different. That is a known headache even for the big production studios.

Like I said if you are a professional you have to invest in the tools you need. If you are not it doesnt matter, just calibrate your tv and for that your footage will look as you want it to look in that particular tv. 

We still dont have the knowledge to properly use this technology (by we I mean us amateurs and even most professionals). Its very new so yes the safe way to go is Rec709 but experimenting and learning is not bad

On 12/14/2019 at 8:52 AM, Lionfi2s said:

Agreed, if the other tv is not calbrated to the same specs it will look different. That is a known headache even for the big production studios.

Like I said if you are a professional you have to invest in the tools you need. If you are not it doesnt matter, just calibrate your tv and for that your footage will look as you want it to look in that particular tv. 

We still dont have the knowledge to properly use this technology (by we I mean us amateurs and even most professionals). Its very new so yes the safe way to go is Rec709 but experimenting and learning is not bad

 

As demonstrated by my little example HLG is ok for surface work with limited colour correction it really is not required for underwater work. To be honest in most cases people do not even have a proper Rec709 monitor. I have been using a mac so far that has a P3 color space and every time I do an edit the colours on the Tv or computer look different. The same happens with my still images video and print

I finally got myself a screen that has 100% RGB/REC709/Adobe RGB and 96% DCI-P3 and the difference between the various mode is very very obvious it makes me think how many videos I have screwed up in the past

To make things more difficult editors let you define a colour space but do not set it for you on the display so you are easily led into errors

The key issue of HDR is BT.2020 the gaming industry demonstrates that you can work with existing colour spaces without making your life impossible and this is the reason why DisplayHDR is taking off in monitors driven by gaming displays

Frankly you could have worked with AdobeGRB and this is clearly an issue as it comes from Adobe or DCI-P3 or even REC709 or sRGB and everything would have been fine instead of defining a theoretical colour space that is just a total pain in the ass

On 12/12/2019 at 12:53 PM, Interceptor121 said:

Blackmagic Ultrastudio HD does not support HLG as it only provides HDMI 2.0a so it is limited to HDR10 and won't support HLG. 

FYI their new Ultrastudio 4k does support it according to the communication I had with them. So it is an option albeit not a cheap one

FYI their new Ultrastudio 4k does support it according to the communication I had with them. So it is an option albeit not a cheap one

8 hours ago, Interceptor121 said:

How can it do that if it has HDMI 2.0a? That makes no sense. Can you paste what they said here? I have had discussions with them and they were around using SDI connections with a field monitor to get HLG which is not what you want


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Their reply:

"I am afraid the decklink mini monitor does not support HDR HLG flag over HDMI. You will have to look at the new Ultrastuio 4k Mini instead.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/ultrastudio/techspecs/W-DLUS-11

Alternatively you can have a look at the Ultrastudio Extreme 3, or internal PCIe card such as the Decklink Extreme 4K 12G. However the Ultrastudio 4K mini is certainly more affordable."
 

3 minutes ago, Lionfi2s said:

Their reply:

"I am afraid the decklink mini monitor does not support HDR HLG flag over HDMI. You will have to look at the new Ultrastuio 4k Mini instead.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/ultrastudio/techspecs/W-DLUS-11

Alternatively you can have a look at the Ultrastudio Extreme 3, or internal PCIe card such as the Decklink Extreme 4K 12G. However the Ultrastudio 4K mini is certainly more affordable."
 

new Ultrastudio mini has HDMI 2.0b output - > improvement!

So thunderbolt to Ultrastudio Mini and HDMI to compatible Tv

Forgot to mention obviously Tv needs to be calibrated and this does not warrant that it will look the same elsewhere but is a start

£765 in UK

By the way the £5-6K of the Apple Display XDR make a Sony BVM-x300 look cheap. 

Alternative to the blackmagic you can also drive an HLG display using HDMI from an external GPU (this is what I have) cost starts at £599. However from my initial tests with my BENQ monitor I can actually grade with it in HLG and in any case final cut pro scopes for HLG do not reach full nits value of PQ (which no camera captures directly so would be log to PQ)

I have tried today driving the HDR Tv using the eGPU and the final cut multiple display with no joy

On 1/9/2020 at 7:09 PM, Interceptor121 said:

Alternative to the blackmagic you can also drive an HLG display using HDMI from an external GPU (this is what I have) cost starts at £599. However from my initial tests with my BENQ monitor I can actually grade with it in HLG and in any case final cut pro scopes for HLG do not reach full nits value of PQ (which no camera captures directly so would be log to PQ)

So this doesn't work?

So this doesn't work?

Exciting news Catalina 10.15.4 beta has a prefer HDR mode that works with non HLG monitor that support VESA displayHDR

We are at beta 3 normally this means next week we have a release!