Video: 5 Myths About Dolby Vision & HDR debunked

There seem no let up in the number of technologies coming to market and whilst some, like HDR, have been slowly advancing on us for many years, the technologies that enable them such as Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and the metadata handling technologies further upstream are more recent. So it’s no surprise that there is some confusion over what’s possible and what’s not.

In this video, Bitmovin and Dolby the truth behind 5 myths surrounding the implementation and financial impact of Dolby Vision and HDR in general. Bitmovin sets the scene by with Sean McCarthy giving an overview on their research into the market. He explains why quality remains important, simply put to either keep up with competitors or be a differentiator. Sean then gives an overview of the ‘better pixels’ principle underlining that improving the pixels themselves is often more effective than higher resolution, technologies such as wide colour gamut (WCG) and HDR.

David Brooks then explains why HDR looks better, explaining the biology and psychology behind the effect as well as the technology itself. The trick with HDR is that there are no extra brightness values for the pixels, rather the brightness of each pixel is mapped onto a larger range. It’s this mapping which is the strength of the technology, altering the mapping gives different results, ultimately allowing you to run SDR and HDR workflows in parallel. David explains how HDR can be mapped down to low-brightness displays,

The last half of this video is dedicated to the myths. Each myth has several slides of explanation, for instance, the one suggests that the workflows are very complex. Hangen Last walks through a number of scenarios showing how dual (or even three-way) workflows can be achieved. The other myths, and the questions at the end, talk about resolution, licensing cost, metadata, managing dual SDR/HDR assets and live workflows with Dolby Vision.

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Speakers

David Brooks David Brooks
Senior Director, Professional Solutions,
Dolby Laboratories
Hagan Last Hagan Last
Technology Manager, Content Distribution,
Dolby Laboratories
Sean McCarthy Sean McCarthy
Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager,
Bitmovin
Kieran Farr Moderator: Kieran Farr
VP Marketing,
Bitmovin

Video: Broadcast Fundamentals: High Dynamic Range

Update: Unfortunately CVP choose to take down this video within 12 hours of this article going live. But there’s good news if you’re interested in HDR. Firstly, you can find the outline and some of the basics of the talk explained below. Secondly, at The Broadcast Knowledge there are plenty of talks discussing HDR! Here’s hoping CVP bring the video back.

Why is High Dynamic Range is like getting a giraffe on a tube train? HDR continues its ascent. Super Bowl LIV was filmed in HDR this year, Sky in the UK has launched HDR and many of the big streaming services support it including Disney+, Prime and Netflix. So as it slowly takes its place, we look at what it is and how it’s achieved in the camera and in production.

Neil Thompson, an Sony Independent Certified Expert, takes a seat in the CVP Common Room to lead us through HDR from the start and explain how giraffes are part of the equation. Dynamic Range makes up two thirds of HDR, so he starts by explaining what it is with an analogy to audio. When you turn up the speakers so they start to distort, that’s the top of your range. The bottom is silence – or rather what you can hear over the quiet hiss that all audio systems have. Similarly in cameras, you can have bright pixels which are a different brightness to the next which represents the top of your range, and the dithering blacks which are the bottom of your range. In video, if you go too bright, all pixels become white even if the subject’s brightness varies which the equivalent of the audio distortion.

With the basic explanation out of the way, Neil moves on to describing the amount or size of dynamic range (DR) which can be done either in stops, contrast ratio or signal to noise ratio. He compares ‘stops’ to a bucket of water with some sludge at the bottom where the range is between the top of sludge and the rim of the bucket. One stop, he explains, is a halving of the range. With the bucket analogy, if you can go half way down the bucket and still hit clear water, you have 1 stop of dynamic range. If you can then go a quarter down with clean water, you have 2 stops. By the time you get to 1/32nd you have 5 stops. If going to 1/64 of the height of the bucket means you end up in the sludge, your system has 5 stops of dynamic range. Reducing the sludge so there’s clear water at 1/64th the height, which in cameras means reducing the noise in the blacks, is one way of increasing the dynamic range of your acquisition.

Update: Unfortunately CVP choose to take down this video within 12 hours of this article going live. But there’s good news if you’re interested in HDR. Firstly, you can find the outline and some of the basics of the talk explained below. Secondly, at The Broadcast Knowledge there are plenty of talks discussing HDR! Here’s hoping CVP bring the video back.

If you would like to know how lenses fit into the equation of gathering light, check out this talk from Cannon’s Larry Thorpe.

Neil looks next at the range of light that we see in real life from sunlight to looking at the stars at night. Our eye has 14 stops of range, though with our iris, we can see the equivalent of 24 stops. Similarly, cameras use an iris to regulate the light incoming which helps move the restricted dynamic range of the camera into the right range of brightness for our shot.

Of course, once you have gathered the light, you need to display it again. Displays’ ability to produce light is measured in ‘nits’, which is the amount of light per metre squared. Knowing how many nits a displays helps you understand the brightness it can show with 1000 nits, currently, being a typical HDR display. Of course, dynamic range is as much about the blacks as the brightness. OLED screens are fantastic at having low blacks, though their brightness can be quite low. LEDs, conversely, Neil explains, can go very bright but the blacks do suffer. You have to also take into account the location of a display device to understand what range it needs. In a dim gallery you can spend longer caring about the blacks, but many places are so bright, the top end is much more important than the blacks.

With the acquisition side explained, Neil moves on to transmission of HDR and it’s like getting a giraffe on a tube train. Neil relates the already familiar ‘log profiles’. There are two HDR curves, known as transfer functions, PQ from Dolby and HLG (Hybrig Log Gamma). Neil looks at which profiles are best for each part of the production workflow and then explains how PQ differs from HLG in terms of expressing brightness levels. In HLG, the brightest part of the signal tells the display device to output as brightly as it can. A PQ signal, however, reserves the brightest signal for 10,000 nits – far higher than displays available today. This means that we need to do some work to deal with the situation where your display isn’t as bright as the one used to master the signal. Neil discusses how we do that with metadata.

Finishing off the talk, Neil takes questions from the audience, but also walks through a long list of questions he brought along including discussing ‘how bright is too bright?’, what to look for in an engineering monitor, lighting for HDR and costs.

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Speakers

Neil Thompson Neil Thompson
Freelance Engineer & Trainer

Webinar: HDR Dynamic Mapping

HDR broadcast is on the rise, as we saw from the increased number of ways to watch this week’s Super Bowl in HDR, but SDR will be with us for a long time. Not only will services have to move seamlessly between SDR and HDR services, but there is a technique that allows HDR itself to be dynamically adjusted to better match the display its on.

Introduced in July 2019, content can now be more accurately represented on any specific display, particularly lower end TVs. Dynamic Mapping (DM), is applies to PQ-10 which is the 10-bit version of Dolby’s Perceptual Quantizer HDR format standardised under SMPTE ST-2084. Because HLG (ARIB STV-B67) works differently, it doesn’t need dynamic mapping. Dynamic Metadata to support this function is defined as SMPTE ST 2094-10, -40 and also as part of ETSI TS 103 433-2.

Stitching all of this together and helping us navigate delivering the best HDR is Dolby’s Jason Power and Virginie Drugeon from Panasonic in this webinar organised by DVB.

Register now!
Speakers

Virginie Drugeon Virginie Drugeon
Senior Engineer for Digital TV Standardisation, Panasonic
Chair, DVB TM-AVC Group
Jason Power Jason Power
Senior Director, Commercial Partnerships and Standards, Dolby Laboratories
Chair, DVB CM-AVC Group

Video: How many Nits is Color Bars?

IABM NITS Webinar

Update: This webinar is now available on-demand. Links in this article have been updated to match.

Brightness, luminance, luma, NITS and candela. What are the differences between these similar terms? If you’ve not been working closely with displays and video, you may not know but as HDR grows in adoption, it pays to have at least a passing understanding of the terms in use.

Date: Thursday January 23rd – 11am ET / 16:00 GMT

Last week, The Broadcast Knowledge covered the difference between Luma and Luminance in this video from YouTube channel DisplacedGamers. It’s a wide ranging video which explains many of the related fundamentals of human vision and analogue video much of which is relevant in this webinar.

To explain the detail of not only what these mean, but also how we use them to set up our displays, the IABM have asked Norm Hurst from SRI, often known as Sarnoff, to come in and discuss his work researching test patterns. SRI make many test patterns which show up how your display is/isn’t working and also expose some of the processing that the signal has gone through on its journey before it even got to the display. In many cases these test patterns tell their story without electronic meters or analysers, but when brightness is concerned, there can still be place for photometers, colour analysers and other associated meters.

HDR and its associated Wide Colour Gamut (WCG) bring extra complexity in ensuring your monitor is set up correctly particularly as many monitors can’t show some brightness levels and have to do their best to accommodate these requests from the incoming signal. Being able to operationally and academically assess and understand how the display is performing and affecting the video is of prime importance. Similarly colours, as ever, a prone to shifting as they are processed, attenuated and/or clipped.

This free webinar from the IABM is led by CTO Stan Moote.

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Speaker

Norm Hurst Norm Hurst
Senior Principal Research Engineer,
SRI International SARNOFF
Stan Moote Stan Moote
CTO,
IABM