The number one resource for information about HDR technology, workflows, tutorials, news and opinion.
Part I: The State of HDR Film Emulation LUTs Part II: Moving Beyond Traditional Film Print Emulation Part III: Negative and Print Clarified During an episode of Grade School, a weekly YouTube Live session where he answers questions on all things color grading, Cullen Kelly untangles the confusion surrounding the order of operations, print vs. negative... Continue Reading →
Frequent Blackmagic forum contributor John Brawley never tires of calling colleagues in the film industry shills and accusing RED of being unethical, but the DP prefers to downplay his own role as official brand ambassador for a scandal-ridden conglomerate guilty of one of the worst cases of financial corruption Japan has ever known. How is... Continue Reading →
Acknowledging that HDR monitoring for every display on-set for the entire length of a production is prohibitively expensive for most productions, Netflix proposes three alternatives: CAMERA TESTS (E.G. HAIR & MAKEUP TESTS) Camera tests for hair and makeup are typically the first time images are evaluated and sent through the entire production pipeline. Some productions... Continue Reading →
We wrote about this back in August. Supposedly, Blackmagic was on top of it. The highlight tool hasn’t worked properly when using the HDR panel in Resolve 17 since day one. X-Rite WB Card Power Window + Highlight Tool Adjusting Global wheel in HDR tools breaks highlighter. Adjusting Offset wheel in Primaries, highlight behaves normally.
LG Display announced a breakthrough in OLED TV technology set to begin production this year and which they are calling OLED.EX. According to the Korean manufacturer, deuterium compounds together with personalized algorithms that learn individual viewing patterns to more efficiently control the display’s energy input will enable an increase in brightness by as much as... Continue Reading →
DP Daria D'Antonio demonstrates an understanding of HDR in her sumptuous work on Sorrentino's semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film The Hand of God, now showing on Netflix. Unfortunately, the brightly lit exterior scenes lit up our entire room, reflecting back onto the screen and ruining the experience - making us wish we could paint the walls black!
The very first portable SSD drive we've ever owned, the Samsung X5, is crazy fast. It also gets quite toasty - even when unmounted. It took just three minutes to copy a 240GB folder of ProRes 4444 clips and some random screen grabs from our 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro to the X5 and a... Continue Reading →
If you leave the house, walk around and point your camera anywhere, it's all but impossible not to encounter luminance values measuring in the hundreds or even thousands of nits. But turn on the TV and watch a Dolby Vision program on Netflix and 99% of the time, it seems like there aren't any luminance... Continue Reading →
“Although there is no official standard regarding the dynamic range definition of HDR, it is generally recognized that a lower threshold for HDR is 13 stops or 8000:1, advancing via 14 stops or 16,000:1 to the current de facto ‘standard’ of 15 stops or 32,000:1. Most of the latest generation of digital motion picture cameras... Continue Reading →
Analyst Bob O’Brien, assessing his predictions for the display industry for 2021, admits he greatly miscalculated MicroLED TV shipments for the year, writing, “We were wrong in predicting that the lowest priced MicroLED models would be offered at less than $100,000 in 2021, and even with a very low unit forecast, we overestimated TV shipments... Continue Reading →
Several YouTubers have said that in 99% of cases, they saw no advantage to spending the extra money to upgrade from 32GB to 64GB RAM for the 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro. Our findings may surprise you. We'll begin with Final Cut Pro and Apple Compressor. Timeline in Final Cut Pro. Two ProRes 4444 4K... Continue Reading →
With the new M1 Macs, transcoding to ProRes 4444 from ProRes RAW is blazing fast in Compressor and it's visually lossless to boot. https://youtu.be/wVZm9fmp4Kw
Forget about proper video levels, color gamuts and bit depth and consider the lowly hot shoe cover protector cap for a moment. Here's how we keep from losing that little bugger when attaching the Rode Wireless GO!
This deceptively titled advert featuring Asus spokesperson Darren Mostyn might lead the viewer to expect to witness some dazzling HDR grading in DaVinci Resolve by an experienced colorist, but we see nothing of the sort. Not only that, but they couldn't even be bothered to shoot the ad in HDR. Watching this video reminds us... Continue Reading →
One week ago, not a single shop had any 16" M1 Max MacBook Pros in stock and we were told that it would take anywhere from eight to ten weeks to get one; but by some miracle it arrived in just seven days. Using Migration Assistant, Time Machine and a slow portable hard drive, transferring... Continue Reading →
Paul Gagnon, Senior Research Director for Consumer Devices at Omdia, spoke with Brian Berkeley, host of The Display Show, about what exactly constitutes mini-LED. PG: "I would say there's some friendly disagreement in the industry about exactly what qualifies as a quote unquote mini-LED set. There is no standardization of this terminology: is it the... Continue Reading →
One year ago, almost to the day, we published a video entitled Why Are HDR Shows So Dark?, which turned out to be one of our most successful rants on YouTube. We've since identified no fewer than a half dozen different contributing factors, including: most shows continue to be lit in an SDR environment using... Continue Reading →
A feature that enables using details from previously uploaded videos has just been added to YouTube, promising to save many of us a lot of time and aggravation. When uploading a video, a message that reads 'reuse details' will appear in the upper right corner. You'll then be prompted to select one of your previously... Continue Reading →
As today's consumer displays can attain brightness levels up to fifteen times higher than legacy SDR screens, the traditional 2D color gamut diagram no longer suffices to characterize the behavior of displays, necessitating a third axis to describe luminance. Nevertheless, although color volume plays a far more important role in color reproduction in HDR than... Continue Reading →
The Daejeon Chronicles 