CRAFT HIGH-END TELEVISION
PRODUCTION
COLIN JACKSON
Clearly you want as much latitude as you can possibly get, because we don’t have the luxury of fine tuning the scene that we’re shooting. Obviously, we’re looking for a cinematic shot, but we’re led by the animals and the behaviour. So for us, HDR is more of a tool that we can deal with in post to decide where we want that range to be. And we still have to remember that our primary broadcast deliverable for most of those productions is still our BBC One client and, as such, is HD and in a standard rec.709 colour space.
I wouldn’t say that most camera operators are specifically out there thinking ‘this will make a perfect HDR image.’ But what they are doing is realising that they can frame with a wider dynamic range in the shot and know that it can be reproduced in the way that they’re visualising it without worrying about clipping highlights too much or ending up crushing the blacks. We’ve been working with high end cameras for a long period of time and our camera operators
are a fairly discerning bunch, and they want to get the best out of that image. And I think they are looking at scenes thinking ‘now I know that that can be delivered in that way’.
We don’t have the luxury to make a decision in the field to decide to protect all these upper highlights because, you never know, you might swing the camera and there may be something else all of a sudden that you’ve not encountered. So it’s about capturing that range and depth to the scene. Along with all that high dynamic range has come sensors that are more sensitive in the dark, so we can use that sensitivity, in more extreme places where we wouldn’t have been able to in the past and not end up with really mucky blacks if that information is there. So just having the sensors and the technology allows us to do things in places that we perhaps might not have thought of in the past.
For Dynasties, they did the HDR grade first and then did the SDR grade afterwards, It was the
Senior Innovation Producer, BBC Studios Springwatch, Big Cat Live, Blue Planet 2, Dynasties, Seven Worlds, One Planet
first time that the producers had got that choice. So they had the choice to play with that HDR space. And, actually, they chose deliberately not to expand it as much, to not really over do the colours and stretch them because they felt they wanted to keep it rooted in a world that people were used to. So it was done at points where it made it helpful, but it wasn’t over expanded. Perhaps some of the earlier HDR stuff, people thought, ‘I’ve got this new toolbox, I’ll do everything’. But that’s like every new toolkit. The moment you get a new toy to play with, you want to push it to its maximum and see what it can do. And then you
rein it back in because as you get to understand that tool, the more you decide where you want to deploy it,
Now we’ve got more people with more experience of working in HDR. And those people have gone through a post cycle with it and are now back out in the field. So they can see the end-to-end of it. It’s very difficult until you’ve seen one end of it to know what you can do with it at the capture end. And with our projects, that can take three or four years in the making. It can be a while before that filters through truly from post to recapture
Winter 2020
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