The Point of No Return

Since uploading my first HLG HDR video to YouTube the other day and seeing those inky blacks and brilliant highlights, I’m hooked. There’s no turning back. Granted, I didn’t do any color correction, so the colors were off – maybe a touch cyan? – but overall, I was quite pleased with what I saw. Thrilled, in fact. YouTube just seems to do a better job with HDR than SDR. In any case, I’m seeing a significantly greater difference in quality than when I stopped uploading in HD and began delivering in 4K. To be frank, in the five or so odd years I’ve been using YouTube, I’ve never received a comment to the effect that the image was utterly unwatchable because of compression algorithms. And let’s face it – I’m never going to be hired to shoot a series for Netflix or distribute my work to theaters, so I’ve got to work with what I’ve got. If I want to be really fussy, when I’ve got friends over, nothing’s preventing me from sharing the original master files instead of watching my videos on YouTube. I’ve already picked up a Ninja Inferno, which I plan to use to shoot V-Log Lite in 60p, as well as doing double duty as a grading monitor – at least until HDR monitors become affordable anyhow. That’s probably a few years down the road, though. Maybe longer. I just have to find some SSDs and an HDMI 2.0 cable – not the easiest thing to do here in Vietnam, by the way.