BEST PRACTICE HDR
WHAT CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Tom Mitchell (TM) Monitoring in HDR on
set is essential. The uplift is getting a sense of the contrast within a scene. I always say, ‘seeing is believing’, particularly when looking at the highlights. If you have a candle against a wall, if you’re looking in 709, the candle looks just as bright as the reflection, the hot spot, on the wall. And when you look at it on an HDR monitor, the candle is so much brighter, and you might instantly recognise this as a problem and look at how you can fix it.
Asa Shoul (AS) Monitoring HDR
on set is a brilliant practice. It can inform the creative team about what adjustments they can make to the lighting or position of cast in a shot to avoid any problems and enhance their storytelling without compromising the overall look. If you’re monitoring in HDR on set, you can see aberrations like the clipping of highlights and practicals or in windows and other things that can be distracting. If the colourist has had to greatly adjust a shot
because the backlight needs to be pulled down then your brain will very quickly realise that something is wrong with the image because it’s been heavily manipulated. It might be the backlight is distractingly bright creating a silhouette effect for your actor or when windows and practical lights have been greatly reduced in luminance to stop them competing for your attention. Another example would be a shot of an actor in front of a car with strong headlights; the actor might almost disappear in the flare and if you fix the bright headlights in the background, the foreground flare now doesn’t make any sense.
TM We talk a lot about the highlights but not so
much about the mid-tones and the shadows. When you’re shooting low contrast scenes - for example, by candle light or a nice warm fire - you’re normally pushing the camera to its limits and seeing a fair amount of noise. The camera is typically daylight balanced and if you look at it on an SDR monitor you might think ‘if I crush the blacks a bit, it will look fine’. As soon as you display that on an HDR monitor, you immediately see the problem. It just doesn’t work. You can’t fix what you don’t see.
AS And if you try to de-noise the clip later you often get a solarising effect when you broadcast it.
We’re called post production, but we’re pre now and we have to be Asa Shoul
False colour mode show SDR values in black and white and HDR values above 203 nits in a coloured pattern
IF YOU FAIL TO PREPARE AS All of the deliverables might not be higher
than HD, SDR to begin with, but you’ll be pretty sure within a year or two, or even during production, that someone will say we’re going to need HDR. If it’s a TV show you’re monitoring straight to
HDR in the prep room. Are VFX aware they’re working in HDR? If you’re working on VFX, you’re not going to be able to afford 300 HDR monitors. We host VFX checks during filming - months before we’re going to be grading anything - to check if anything’s been broken to steer away from and avoid having to be fixed later. We’ll have camera tests and lens tests,
hair and make-up and then location. At each stage they’re slightly different and we want the cinematographer and director to be aware of what they need to capture for the look they’re going for to tell that story. It’s got to be story-lead. It’s got to work with narrative. It’s got to enhance where you’re directing the eye. Most of the time it’s about faces. The actor’s
going to be talking and you want to see them. And rather than having to do lots of work vignetting them and sorting things out later, you want as good a ‘negative’ to begin with. You almost want to go back to those ‘prelight’
days where the cinematographer could preview their exposure settings before going to the lab with their final print and they would just have to nail it.
You don’t want to make a LUT that’s going to be
so powerful that it hides problems or, if you change your mind later, reveals things that were hidden during that process. It’s better to be able to enhance and take your LUT in different directions in post rather than having to salvage or fix anything. We always start with the deliverables, which
can be quite complex. Different streaming services and broadcasters have different requirements for what they want to broadcast and what they want to archive. There’s lots of back and forward with broadcaster, VFX and dailies, to make sure they’re happy with the pipeline, before you even start filming.
I remember a DP saying he didn’t like the term ‘colour correction’ as it inferred that there’s something wrong to begin with. They liked ‘colour enhancement’ Asa Shoul
AN ACE IN THE HOLE TM Unless we’re in touch directly with the post
house, we always set up an ACES pipeline by default unless told otherwise. ACES is a well-known standard that virtually every post production company knows. You can make up almost any ‘colour managed workflow’ but you need a colour managed workflow of some form to deal with the fact you’ve got multiple inputs and multiple different deliverables
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