BILL BAGGELAAR: High dynamic range is not new. It is the way that most of us see the world every day. Our eyes are high dynamic range and wide colour gamut-sensitive equipment.
On a bright sunny day, they can see cloud highlight details while still being able to see into the shadows. In dark environments, we can start to see detail in extremely low to practically no light. Some cameras are at least getting closer to being able to detect some of the same things on those sunny days. But they have also gotten better in the dark - not as good as our eyes, but certainly better as the sensor technology improves. On the other hand, the television sets or other types of displays that we typically have used to watch content has a much lower dynamic range than our eyes, or even the cameras that are being used to capture the content. So TV viewing, up to this point, has been what we now call, Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) where we have maybe in the order of seven to nine stops of exposure depending on the display. With these new displays, we are now talking about Ultra-HD (4K/UHD) and High Dynamic Range (HDR) that could potentially go up to 20 stops. But more practically for the consumers, were talking maybe 12 to 14 stops. We are inherently contrast-sensitive beings and so what this increased dynamic range does, is it gives us an increased sense of sharpness, detail, clarity, color and saturation; all these things that we see in the real world, but were not able to realize on todays consumer displays or even in theaters, for that matter. And since we are incredibly adaptable beings, when were watching a movie or a TV show in a particularly either dark or bright location, our eyes and brain adapt. We may see something right away where the contrast doesnt necessarily feel right, but we adapt pretty quickly to it and can watch it and not be distracted by it.
But now with these higher dynamic range displays, were able to really start to give people more picture details in order to provide a more immersive experience. As I mentioned, getting better color saturation goes along with this whole wider color gamut piece that is part of HDR. So HDR is not just about contrast, or about resolution; or even about color; its about being able to combine all three to represent images more accurately on consumer displays. This gives content creators an expanded canvas to represent things that are true to life or they can even go hyper real. For finishing movies for theaters, we work in P3 color space, which is a wider color gamut than the TV standard, Rec. 709. Often times there are very specific colors, particular purples, reds or translucent colors; that cannot be displayed in SDR/Rec.709, so we have to do additional color correction to nicely squash it down into Rec. 709 for consumer displays. Theres all sorts of saturated colors whether it goes from blue to orange to purple to green that we can now represent on consumer displays that weve never been able to represent before and that provides something closer to the original artistic vision, representing what the DP and Director originally intended for the viewers to see.