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 headroom; but then there’s also another half of people that are always very skeptical like, ‘Oh my gosh! Why do we need another 1,000 nits? It’s like I’m barely using 1,000, why would I ever need 2,000?’, and I think you just have to think of it holistically. So, you’ve been on set, you know, from the people I’ve talked to, I think in the past, monitors were more considered kind of like an afterthought or more like a viewing device rather than a reference device for what you’re mastering might end up looking like. So, I think especially now, with the technology improving, people are really starting to take HDR monitors on set much more seriously; and bodies like Netflix and others are going to start mandating – eventually – maybe some other calibration techniques, or maybe eventually down the road, even certain kinds of monitor specifications; but as we continue to improve, I think you’ll see the creatives start to follow suit and really start to utilize that extra headroom that they have. [As] David was saying, even if you’re mastering for 1,000 nits, just because people in the past aren’t very used to seeing that on set, they’re not really taking advantage of all that extra headroom. So, that’s where having these tools [that] confirm luminance values and ranges can really help push the threshold; that’s one of my favorite things about the new histogram feature we have, is that’ll actually give you an exact percentage of what overall percentage of your frame is actually within HDR ranges; and more often than not, we see even on HDR shows, people are only using maybe like zero to five percent of the image that’s encapsulated within HDR luminance.”