We still ETTR with the Komodo, but not nearly as much as we used to do in our early days with the Sony a7s III. For years, there’s never been a clip that we didn’t expose to avoid important shadow detail falling in the noise floor, and then some! Interestingly enough, some shots with the... Continue Reading →
Sony Engineer: External Metadata Not Necessary To Preserve Creative Intent
Toshiyuki Gura, Chief Distinguished Engineer, Sony, declared at the 2018 IEEE Broadcast Symposium that external metadata isn’t necessary to preserve creative intent. https://youtu.be/CfNatefiAP8 Which isn’t all that surprising, given that SMPTE defines HDR10 metadata, but not what televisions should do with it. Other manufacturers also ignore static metadata, applying instead their own tone mapping on... Continue Reading →
If your working color space is ACES or DWG, you need to read this
The following is from a presentation in Poland last month entitled “Protect your Creative Intent with ACES”, but it pertains equally well to those who are into DaVinci Wide Gamut as their working color space: if anything other than the log of the hero camera is going to be your working color space, it's essential... Continue Reading →
LG prevents users from disabling auto-dimming on 2023 OLED TVs
According to Vincent Teoh of HDTVTest fame, LG has changed the service menu interface on its 2023 OLED TVs, including the C3 and G3, and not for the better. Consequently, it is no longer possible to disable the TPC and GSR auto-dimming algorithms. TPC gradually dims down the picture on static scenes and scenes where... Continue Reading →
MiniLED vs OLED!
The Liquid Retina XDR miniLED display of the MacBook Pro (2021) has greater brightness and something like double the color volume of the LG CX, making it possible to see details in highlights and color differences that are indiscernible on the OLED display. On the other hand, the larger size of the TV makes it... Continue Reading →
DaVinci Resolve HDR Palette
Can't say how much we appreciate the HDR Palette and customizable zones in DaVinci Resolve. In the screenshot, we targeted the tiny bit of light outdoors. You've still got to watch the waveform monitor when making adjustments though, since even when it looks like an area has been isolated in the viewer, the actual coverage... Continue Reading →
LG C3 4:4:4 Pass Through: No Longer Necessary To Go Through Convoluted Process of Enabling PC Mode
While testing out the new LG C3, Vincent Teoh discovered that enabling 4:4:4 pass-through has been simplified with the latest lineup of LG OLEDs. It's recommended to use 4:4:4 pass-through when grading HDR content. "Delving into the user menu, I saw a number of changes from what's found on last year's LG C2. One, if... Continue Reading →
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Colorist: Don’t Place Actors In Front Of Windows
Colorist Asa Shoul, on more than one occasion, including during an interview with Variety, counsels cinematographers, “When discussing the dos and don’ts of HDR, I would advise not placing actors in front of windows as the extra brightness that can be seen in the sky might make the actor appear less visible.” Which is among... Continue Reading →
An HDR Tutorial That Doesn’t Suck
The free tutorials over at Jonas Westling’s LearnHDRvideo are a great resource for anyone just starting out.
HDR: Does Pupil Variability Cause Excruciating Agony?
Pupillometry of HDR Video Viewing. Scott Daly, Evan Gittermana, and Grant Mulliken. Dolby Laboratories, Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA Apple, Cupertino, CA, USA An excellent study by researchers from Apple and Dolby Laboratories investigates a common assumption that increased pupil variability causes discomfort while consuming HDR content. https://youtu.be/zl31JrOWiEg SDR version of the short film ‘Telescope’... Continue Reading →
Why Netflix Shows Are Graded To 600 Nits
Reference white has been standardized as 203 nits and while that may work out well for live broadcast, for the purposes of dramatic narrative work, it leaves less headroom for specular highlights and emissive light sources. Placing diffuse white at around 140 nits allows room to increase that figure in individual scenes for powerful expressive... Continue Reading →
You can put crazy numbers in MaxFALL and MaxCLL and get exactly the same picture
“Unfortunately, for HDR10, there is no reference implementation, like everyone does its own kind of HDR10, so some TVs do clipping, some TVs do their own kind of tone mapping, and in fact, if you mess up with the static metadata, like MaxFALL and MaxCLL, nothing happens in the picture, so trust me, you can... Continue Reading →
Steven Robertson: Don’t Use HDR Reference Mode On MacBook Pro
Steven Robertson, a software engineer at Google, offers up an irreverent, unique and often funny perspective on HDR, with an emphasis on UGC rather than multi-million dollar productions. Just one example: "We suspect that most of our audience who's going to be trying to grade HDR for the first time is going to be on... Continue Reading →
“HDR grades which offer little, to no benefit over SDR, will be rejected”
The following excerpts are from Technical Specification for the Delivery of Content Sky UK, the UK's largest pay-TV broadcaster. Primary Image-Acquisition To ensure viewers observe a noticeable improvement in resolution between the different definition tiers (e.g., HD and UHD) as well as SDR and HDR, the minimum camera requirements in Table 1 must be met... Continue Reading →
Chasing middle gray
“We’re no longer exposing for middle gray and letting the rest “roll off.” […] Through all of these techniques, it’s important to recognize that our old friend and exposure aid, middle (18%) gray, will be of limited usefulness, as middle gray will shift with the audience’s adaptation to brightness changes. It may be possible for... Continue Reading →
A Cinema Luminance Range by the People, for the People: Viewer Preferences on Luminance Limits for a Large-Screen Environment, by Suzanne Farrell, Timo Kunkel, and Scott Daly
A number of websites have published the findings of Dolby's study of luminance preferences for the small screen, yet they all but ignore the fact that Dolby also conducted a similar study with a large screen. Many assume that the larger screen in a movie theater only needs a fraction of the luminance of a... Continue Reading →
ETTR Is Not Overexposure
At the very end of his article on why S-Log3 no longer needs to be exposed to the right with Sony’s current generation of sensors, Alister Chapman makes a great point: “And one last thing: I don’t like the use of the term “over exposing” to describe shooting a bit brighter to help eliminate noise.... Continue Reading →
Colorist Charles Fréville On Ganglands (Season 2)
We really enjoyed the first season of Ganglands on Netflix, but nothing prepared us for the striking visuals of season 2. Not only the daring camera work and lighting that often immersed characters in inky black shadow, but the bold grading as well. So we just had to reach out to Charles Fréville, a highly... Continue Reading →
Coming Soon!
The video of Ha at the restaurant shot with the Komdo on the DJI RS3 Pro looked a bit shaky, so we might have a go at stabilizing the footage with Gyroflow and share the results. Since the trial version of Assimilate Player Pro Studio has unlocked CinemaDNG, we may test it out with some... Continue Reading →
The Daejeon Chronicles 