POST


HIGH-END TELEVISION CRAFT


AIDAN FARRELL


Head of Grading, The Farm Becoming You, The Third Day, Jamestown, Riviera, The Grand Tour, Downton Abbey, Utopia


While I’m doing a Dolby Vision HDR grade, I might analyse a shot or a scene just to see how it looks in SDR, but one must be mindful. The reason I don’t feel I need to keep checking every single scene in 709 at that time is because the 709 can then look completely underwhelming. Your eyes are adjusting so much in these darkened rooms that if I was to do that, you turn your eyes to the 709 and you think ‘Oh God, that’s a bit flat’, and then you start questioning yourself. And then you turn back to the HDR and think ‘Oh God, that’s bright.’ You have to trust yourself and trust the process. I make sure that it looks damn good in HDR knowing that when I


86 Spring 2021 televisual.com


do the SDR down the line, it will be fine. To run them simultaneously is a recipe for disaster. You’re talking about something that has 1000 Nits of luminance, against something at 100 Nits, you’ll drive yourself crazy. You’ve got to get the best out of each process whether you’re doing Dolby Vision or HDR 10, you must give 100% to that process.


I will have read the scripts, I will have gone through various meetings with the producers, the director, the DoP about what their vision is, what I can bring to it and what my suggestions are. Regardless of HDR, that has an impact up to design. So


for example, if it was decided that we’re going to have a monochrome sort of palette, very pastel, but with certain colours coming through and we’re not going to have any blues, if the designers are going to Ikea and spending two and half grand on blue vases it would be ridiculous. So it is a collaborative process.


HDR is really a perception, the stop difference doesn’t change. If you’ve got a character against a window, the difference between the character’s negative side to the top end of the window could be six stops. In HDR it’s still six stops but it looks different. The window looks much brighter and because of that, the face will look darker. So the contrast ratio is bigger but technically the same camera has shot it and the stuff is correct, it’s just the perception of it. So if you were lighting that in HDR on set, and you saw what I was seeing in the grade in HDR, you might adjust it because of the perception.


HDR is a beautiful thing. We’ve got the DPs on board with it now because originally they hated it and


were sort of fearful of it. And rightly so because in the past I’ve seen some horrific HDR grades. Just because you’re in HDR doesn’t mean you have to put every bit of sugar on the cake. You have to be very subtle with it. My analogy is TV dramas in SDR. With all the tools that we’ve got now, just because you’ve got those tools doesn’t mean we have to pump it up to 150. So why would you do that in HDR? HDR doesn’t have to be all bells and whistles. If you have a nightscape in Hong Kong, it will look great in SDR. It will look even better in HDR. In HDR it will still look real if you want it to look real. It’s how you handle it. If it’s looking too dark against all those highlights in HDR, we’ll fix it.


VFX is the other issue. To my knowledge I’m not really aware that the VFX companies have been creating, animating and compositing in HDR or monitoring in HDR. There must be a consideration from the VFX artists to make sure that they’re aware of the deliverable, especially when there’s seven or eight vendors. I’ve been lucky but I know of other graders who have got into trouble with it.


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