Essential Guide: HDR For Cinematography

April 20th 2020 - 09:00 AM
Tony Orme, Editor at The Broadcast Bridge

High dynamic range and wide color gamut combined with 4K resolution and progressive frame rates have catapulted broadcast television to new levels of immersive experience for the viewer. As HDR and WCG are relatively new to television, we need to both understand their application and how we monitor them to enable us to surpass the levels of quality and immersive experience cinematographers demand.

Although we’ve been using camera log curves, in the guise of gamma, for as long as we’ve been broadcasting television, the real impact they provide has started to become apparent as we move to HDR. Not only do they form a type of video compression, the camera log curves also add to the aesthetic quality of the image and to get the best out of HDR broadcast engineers, technologists, and their managers, must all understand the impact of this technology.

WCG (Wide Color Gamut) is delivering vibrancy beyond our wildest dreams with extended greens and greater saturation. But this new color space is starting to expose the limitations of the existing YCbCr color subsampling. WCG has provided us with a new opportunity to free ourselves from the limitations of YCbCr to deliver even greater quality.

Download this Essential Guide today to understand how to get the most out of HDR to make programs that meet the demands of today’s cinematographers.

HDR is much more than just a marginal increase in picture quality. It opens up a whole new level of creativity that we must work with and embrace. This Essential Guide will help you achieve that.

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