Blackest Blacks: Ten Things to Know About Producing HDR
By Jim Bask
Shake your viewers all night long with the best-looking high dynamic range video imaginable. For those about to color grade, we salute you.
High dynamic range, or HDR, gives video producers an expanded range of colors and brightness to display their videos. From a standards perspective, it’s the journey from Rec. 709 video to Rec. 2020, as you can see in the excellent simulation shown in Figure 1. From a brightness perspective, it’s the journey from 300–500 nits to 1,000–4,000 nits. And from a marketing perspective, it’s the promise of the blackest black viewers have ever seen on their screens.
While the transition from HD to 4K was straightforward, the transition from standard dynamic range (SDR) to HDR is much more profound, and it requires many new tools and workflow changes. In this article, I’ll identify the 10 things you need to know about HDR and introduce you to some HDR producers and technologists, and to technologies these producers leveraged along the way.
1. It’s actually quite simple.
HDR sounds complex, and at a technical level it is. Abstractly, however, it involves just five simple concepts.
First, to acquire the expanded brightness and color palette needed for HDR display, you have to capture and maintain your video in 10-bit or higher formats. Second, you’ll need to color grade your video to fully use the expanded palette. Third, you’ll have to choose and support one or more HDR technologies to reach the broadest number of viewers. Fourth, for several of these technologies, you’ll need to manage color and other metadata through the production workflow to optimize display on your endpoints. Finally, although you’ll be using the same codecs and adaptive bitrate (ABR) formats as before, you’ll have to change a few encoding settings to ensure compatibility with your selected HDR TVs and other devices…[continue reading]