It's been six long years since the UHD Alliance announced their specifications for Ultra HD Premium requiring devices be able to display no less than 90% of the DCI-P3 color space - in area, not volume. Likewise, the EBU published User Requirements for Video Monitors in Television Production, which proposed now outmoded 2-D diagrams for evaluating color... Continue Reading →
Free Fuji 3510 Film Emulation LUT
Cullen Kelly's offering a free Fuji 3510 film emulation LUT for use with ACES and DaVinci Wide Gamut. We can't honestly say we're really fond of the flat, yellowish-green look, but it might work for one of your projects - and free HDR compatible LUTs aren't exactly falling out of the sky!
Calman Adds AutoCal Support for 2023 LG Alpha 9 Series TVs; LG Internal Pattern Generator Support Added for 2022 & 2023 TVs
“The C3 can also be 3D LUT calibrated, especially now that the latest release of Calman has added AutoCal support for LG's 2023 Alpha 9 series TVs, including the C3 and G3, besides fixing the internal test pattern generator for 2022 and 2023 models.” HDTVTest Photo: HDTVTest “Update 20 July 2023 about 2022 TV models – over... Continue Reading →
Recap: P3-D65 vs. Rec.2020
“People’s relation to color films is precisely the same as it was in relation to the first Talkies. When sound was first introduced, people were so astonished that they wanted to hear moving pictures talk endlessly like actual people. The upshot of this was that initially there were lots of films filled with songs catering... Continue Reading →
FilmLight Looks
HDR Video Shooters will primarily be interested in the Core Looks, which are divided into three different collections: the C100, C200 and C300. The C100 group is comprised of film emulations based on measurements of real film stocks or film processes. All of the C100 profiles produce a rich color palette with deeply saturated colors,... Continue Reading →
4,000-Nit Display: Viewers Experience Little To No Eyestrain, Prefer Even Higher Luminances
A study where participants watched video content on an HDR display under various ambient lighting conditions and asked to complete questionnaires to document their observations and subjective preferences as well as any visual fatigue they might have experienced found that subjects reported experiencing little to no visual fatigue. Test Setup Researchers used a Dolby 37” prototype... Continue Reading →
Christopher Nolan Praises 4K UHD HDR
You might say that Christopher Nolan’s a huge fan of HDR. During his acceptance speech upon receiving the DEG Vanguard Award during the 4K Ultra HD Summit at Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center in 2018, Nolan recounted how home viewing has impacted the structure of his films and shared his enthusiasm for 4K Ultra HD... Continue Reading →
Sr. Colorist, Marvel Studios: All Streaming Productions Monitored In HDR & SDR On Set
postPerspective's Randi Altman interviewed Marvel Studios’ Senior Finishing Colorist Matt Watson during a virtual roundtable. Randi Altman: Do you often create LUTs for a project? How does that help? Matt Watson: Yes, we create show LUTs for every project. To be specific, we design our looks within the ACES framework as LMTs, which represent the visual... Continue Reading →
Can Your TV Reproduce These Colors?
This twitter account has a number of illustrations of colors that can't be reproduced by HDTV (designated in gray). Photo: dot-color.com
Future-Proof Color Management Strategies
In this excellent seminar, FilmLight's Daniele Siragusano discusses future-proof color management strategies optimized for multi-delivery (SDR and HDR). He's also the first to point out (to the best of our knowledge, anyway), how diffuse white level affects our perception of color. https://vimeo.com/298131298
3D-LUT Optimization for High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut Color Processing
In A Review of 3D-LUT Performance in 10-Bit and 12-Bit HDR BT.2100 PQ, published in the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal in March 2020, JD Vandenberg and Stefano Andriani concluded that HDR requires larger LUTs to achieve error-free interpolation comparable to those used for SDR, writing: "Tetrahedral interpolation outperformed all other interpolations for both SDR and HDR... Continue Reading →
Massive 201″ Micro-OLED Virtual Theater? 4K? Only 79 grams? 1/10th the cost of Apple’s Vision Pro? We’re all in!
One of the biggest issues facing HDR is not so much that flagship TVs by Samsung, Panasonic, LG and Sony aren’t able to display stunning picture quality, but that ordinary people don’t watch movies and TV shows in a room with 5 nits surround luminance, 6500 K bias lighting and walls sitting back 20 feet... Continue Reading →
Dolby Vision Technical Webinar | Summer 2023
Just a few highlights from Dolby's webinar Changes to Dolby Vision Licensing New Guidance on Setting the Mastering Display New Recommendations Regarding Full & Video Levels Dolby Vision License In the Legacy Program, components (Trims License, eCMU License and Professional Tools) were bundled together for $2,500 for a period of 12 months. The new program... Continue Reading →
Diffuse White Level of Most Episodic HDR Content Nowhere Near 203 Nits
We've written elsewhere that the majority of HDR narrative work has a diffuse white level much lower than that recommended by the ITU and that it's a constantly shifting target. This may frustrate those desperate for hard and fast rules, but this approach has a number of advantages, not the least of which is that... Continue Reading →
Colorists on Declining to Use HDR’s Extended Brightness
“There are filmmakers who I work with whose answer is identical: 'I want the HDR to be identical to the SDR. I want it to have the same dynamic range. I want it to have the same color gamut. I want nothing whatsoever to change. All I want to change is the deliverable itself because... Continue Reading →
Short Takes: HDR Productions Only Use 0-5% of HDR Range
Nate McFarlin, currently Senior Content Engineer at Dolby Laboratories, talking about Canon's lineup of production monitors when he was still a Senior Quality Engineer Specialist at Canon USA: "Whenever we announce the next monitor with even higher brightness, there's a whole horde of people that are always extremely excited because now they have so much... Continue Reading →
Graeme Nattress on Highlight Roll-Off
Graeme Nattress was kind enough to answer some questions we had about highlight roll-off in RED's Output Transform LUT. According to the Red.com website, ‘very soft’ highlight roll-off compresses highlights the least, while 'hard' compresses highlights the most. But 'very soft' makes HDR footage resemble SDR and ‘hard’ allows highlights to sparkle. So, what exactly... Continue Reading →
RCM IPP2 Still Broken
We still can't recommend using a Resolve Color Managed workflow with RED's IPP2 output DRT because it causes lifted blacks that can be seen in the title cards that precede and follow videos made in this manner. This doesn't happen when using RED's output transform LUT in a node-based color managed workflow, which is what... Continue Reading →