CRAFT HIGH-END TELEVISION


POST


ADAM INGLIS


The interesting thing is the difference in how the technology has been received by my different clients. The wildlife documentary film makers I work with were ecstatic when they first saw HDR. It allowed them to get much closer to what they have been striving for for so long, a “window-on-the-world” experience. They’ve always been working at the cutting edge of image technology and HDR helps them get to where they want to go. Conversely, the feature film people have been more resistant. To them it’s not filmic and doesn’t have the cinematic texture they work so hard to produce. HDR to them is too sharp, too video-like, it’s a more of a gimmick designed to sell televisions and not to create art. So I will tend to approach the HDR grade for a fiction feature films more like I would an SDR grade, with HDR giving us a bit extra here and there for fun, whereas for a wildlife documentary we want to exploit the full extent of the medium.


There are things we have to take into account that we didn’t before. You can get immune to a level of brightness, your eye has to do


more work adapting to the extremes and your perception of tonal ranges is affected by context. I’ve had images blazing away at 800nits and the client still commenting that it’s “too dark”.


There is a danger of distraction because your relative brightness is changed and your eye will adapt to the new brightness level. If you have a bright lamp in the foreground and your actor in the background then not only will the lamp draw the eye, but it will make the actor appear darker. Small specular highlights look great in HDR, but if you have a super bright one winking away in an area of the frame away from your expensive actor, you’ll need to dull that down.


You can achieve things now that would be impossible in SDR, for example in Perfect Planet there’s a scene with these desert ants that can survive in the hottest temperatures on earth. With HDR we could really make the desert feel scorching hot, and really carry that story point. HDR expands our story-


Senior Colourist, freelance A Perfect Planet, Earth At Night in Colour, Tiny World, Our Planet, Britannia, Mogul Mowgli


telling toolset.


In many ways it also reduces the workload - in SDR half the work is deciding which part of the camera’s dynamic range you will present to the audience. Are you going to expose for the sky or the foreground? With HDR we can have both, so that grad on the sky you’d need in SDR is not just unnecessary in HDR but can actually reduce the impact of the image, so leave it off.


You have to pick one of HDR, SDR theatrical or SDR video as your master version. Until recently most clients have wanted to lead with


the SDR version as that’s what most people would be watching, either TV or theatrical. But as HDR televisions are becoming increasingly common place amongst consumers and our clients are realising the potential of HDR we have moved towards the HDR being primary delivery for TV. With the wildlife shows I do, the last primary SDR grade I did was “Seven Worlds, One Planet”, but then on the follow up, “A Perfect Planet“ we lead with HDR instead.


A good HDR grade is something that looks better than an SDR grade. If it’s better in SDR then you’re probably doing it wrong.


Spring 2021 televisual.com 87


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