Steve Yedlin: HDR Is Just A Grading Style

Steve Yedlin shares his insights into HDR on the Go Creative Show

Steve Yedlin: You know, we already had those problems, we haven’t even solved them, but now we’re piling more on with all of this HDR stuff, which is, you know, real for the most part, as a format, as a signal format, as opposed to a hardware technology. You know, all the HDR stuff is really just another place for things to get screwed up, and not much more than that. So-called HDR markets itself as being exactly what the filmmaker intended, except they demand, you know – when I say ‘they’, it’s a little bit amorphous – sometimes it’s a mandate, sometimes it’s more self-imposed – but there’s sort of a demand [that] the HDR version look different. But if you can get what you want, if you can get exactly the author’s intent out of SDR, then by definition, you have to distort it to make it look different on HDR. There’s this kind of confusing people into thinking that a style, like a color grading style that shows off the monitor, what the monitor can do differently than another one, is the format… but it’s not a format, it’s a color grading style. And you don’t have to do that style. So anyway, there’s all these… I don’t know, there’s just so many layers of confusion and marketing mumbo-jumbo that gets people confused about what they even are looking for, how to even compare things…

Ben Consoli: I can appreciate that it’s… you know, there were decades of SD, and then HD came around, and ever since HD became the norm, it’s been this constant like, ‘what’s next?’, and it’s, you know, obviously, went into 4K. There was a brief stint with 3D that didn’t seem to go anywhere, but now we’re starting to talk about HDR, like you’re talking about. And I’m actually… I don’t know much about HDR. We don’t talk about it much on the show, not because we’re avoiding it just doesn’t come up. But since we’re talking about it now, like in the case of Glass Onion, did you film it in HDR per se, in preparation for HDR streaming, or are you filming in SDR and then making alterations after the fact, for it to work?

Steve Yedlin: That’s a great, the way you phrase that question is a great example of the misinformation, because that’s like, how you’re talking about is exactly how, sort of, the marketing aspect, wants us to talk about it. But the reality is HDR is, or so-called HDR versus SDR – which is a bizarre differentiation that I also even think is kind of a false one – but it’s a format, you know, like if you compare, like instead of comparing SDR for a second, let’s compare two different color spaces. You know, like, a Mac computer uses Display P3 color space and most HD TVs or HD monitors are gonna use a color space called Rec.1886 – which is colloquially, and incorrectly, called 709, but whatever – these two color spaces for every single color, except for just a few of the most garish colors, like in a neon sign or something like that – they’re capable of reproducing the exact same colors. Capable of. So, when you convert between the two, it should look exactly the same.

So, the fact that, people have been conditioned to misunderstand it and think that if you have a wider color gamut color space, that means everything is going to look different. That’s false. If everything looks different, somebody literally just made a mistake. It’s like saying, you know, if you convert feet to meters, that everything’s going to get bigger. It’s just a different measuring stick. The fact that the unit is bigger doesn’t mean that the thing you’re measuring is bigger. Both of these things can represent the colors equally. And when we get into HDR – HDR as a format – you know, I’m differentiating these two, because obviously, having the new higher end hardware is just a benefit – there’s no downside of better monitors that can show blacks and get brighter and not milk out and all of that, so I’m talking about it as a format, as opposed to just a hardware, because you can get an HDR compliant monitor, or you know, a monitor that’s good enough to be called HDR, and put an SDR signal in it, it’s going to look fantastic. You can get the black blacks, you can get the brightest brights that the TV can make out of it, so yeah, so basically, to go back to the question, really, what we’re doing is, we’re shooting the movie to look exactly how we want to make it look, and we’re gonna make it look that way in the different delivery formats. And we just treat HDR as another color space, the same way that Display P3 is a color space, like [BT]1886 is a color space, and Rec.2100, which is the standard for HDR, is a color space. So, we don’t buy into that marketing that the fact that you’re in a different color space means you have to make the movie look different. We just make it look exactly like what we want, and we do the technically correct mathematical transformations when delivering to the different color spaces so that it looks the same. It’s a slightly simplified version of it.