Black level mastered at 0.005 discussion and Titles affected

[Staying Salty]

This is an issue that generates a lot of discussion and frustration across various threads. I think it would be beneficial to the members if there was one go to thread. I suppose that you could calibrate a HDR10 .005 mode to get the proper blacks fairly easy. At least you can manually adjust your display to match the disc.

As far as the actual settings for the various TVs, you would have to view the posts and decide what the consensus is.

Originally Posted by Geoff D

It's worth mentioning that displays which actually read the metadata and adjust their mapping accordingly are already correcting for this, as explained by Kris Deering, but those which discard the metadata are having this problem.

Originally Posted by Kris Deering

Interesting thought, though I haven't heard of a movie reporting 0 for black that was actually mastered on the Pulsar. I've seen plenty with 1000 for white that were done with the Pulsar. I know for Universal they did this because the UHD Blu-ray group said that titles should be limited to 1000 nits initially, so they did what they were told to do while others stayed with 4000.

I just had a talk with Stacey on this. He said that displays should be tone mapping the .005 to their true black. With Dolby Vision or VS10 (dolby tone mapping for HDR10) this would not be an issue, but HDR10 based displays are typically only tone mapping the top end only. He said that they could have also told the encode to do black at 64 despite the displays true black.

Basically, more issues for getting the picture right that will leave most scratching their head.

Originally Posted by Kris Deering

I think you guys are confusing the issue. The issue isn't whether a movie looks contrasty or their use of blacks/grays in the image. You'll see huge variations in that depending on the look they were trying to achieve. This is to test if the black floor is actually black or not, and comparing it to other versions that were truly black (like BD). Whether a movie goes to a true black or not has nothing to do with HDR or non-HDR, so it should be the same. This can only be tested with a true black out in a movie.

The issue, ^ is the disc encoded at 0.005 or 0 black level? After that is determined, then you can determine if your TV automatically adjusts if it is 0.005 or do you have to make a manual adjustment.

In below post I will list the Titles that the community comes to a consensus that need this adjustment to get the most accurate/best picture.