PRODUCTION


HIGH-END TELEVISION CRAFT


MARK PURVIS


thinking about SDR and HDR becomes the afterthought


Md, Mission MISSION CREDITS His Dark Materials, Small Axe, Brave New World, Gangs of London, Rebecca, Enola Holmes


We keep on using this term high-end ‘television’ but maybe we should stop as, actually, it’s home cinema. Now production values are comparable with feature films. If you’re sitting down to watch your 65 inch 4k HDR television with Dolby Atmos sound, that’s a far cry from watching it on your 21 inch CRT TV. You’re now seeing platforms produce content with the same production values that used to be reserved for cinema. If you look at a show like The Crown, you just can’t compare that with what television used to be like.


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The biggest issue right now Winter 2020 televisual.com


is that the HDR is not treated as a priority, it’s treated as a secondary deliverable. If you start with the HDR, and you go down to the SDR, in my opinion, it’s a lot easier to achieve better results. I often watch HDR content at home and think to myself, we haven’t quite hit the nail on the head yet. And when you talk to various DoPs they sort of think retrospectively that they would have done things a little bit differently had they been monitoring in HDR. We need to get to a point where we’re treating HDR as a primary deliverable. The problem at the moment is all the tools on set are predominately SDR. Everybody’s


With HDR monitoring on set, there is still a cost factor there. Not a significant one. But the more accurate you get those colour decisions made on set, the more efficient your whole post pipeline is with vfx etc. If you’re dealing with a project where you’ve got a large amount of animation and so forth, you want to make sure those images that come out of the vfx pipeline are truly reflective of what was intended so that you’ve got minimal correction in the post pipeline.


It’s not just about the TV set. The reason we’ve put such an emphasis on HDR and colour science has been because of the rapid development of tablets which I think is quite often underestimated. What always strikes me is, whenever you’re in an airport, just look at how many people are watching, in ambient daylight, content on their iPads. Those iPads are powerful enough to produce an HDR image.


That is the fundamental change between watching your CRT TV as an event in your living room in a fairly controlled environment. If your content is really compulsive and really good people are going to want to watch it wherever they are, particularly the millennial generation.


Rec 709 was invented for your CRT TV. And once we had LCD panels come out, the consistency between LCD panels and the calibration for those LCD panels meant nothing ever looked the same. Whereas now as we go into HDR and Dolby Vision, we have a lot more control over what the viewer is watching. If you’re watching something in broad daylight in rec.709, you’re going to struggle to see a lot of the detail. Whereas if you’re watching HDR in an ambient light environment, that’s probably more akin to what the filmmakers intended. I think an emphasis on HDR gives filmmakers a fighting chance of making sure that the audience is watching their content in the best possible way across various platforms.


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