I am once again getting confused by how much shadow detail ought to be visible in HDR. Since I started watching UHD Blu-rays 4 months ago I’ve had trouble working out what the right settings should be or what profiles to use.
I initially watched
HDR10 titles in default “HDR” mode with standard settings (OLED light 100, Contrast 100, Brightness 50, colour 55, all processing/interpolation off save for “Dynamic contrast” on “low”). This looked fine, however there were many instances in films where shots that were supposed to be black (such as the background of end credit frames or fade outs to black) would be a letterboxed 2.39:1 dark grey. In most films black would actually be black in the background of credits, save for some weird frames which stood out. What’s worse was the banding and artefacting, like dodgy-looking tonemapping in the sanctum scene from Infinity War or the awful banding in the bar entrance scene near the beginning of La La Land which even had flickering grey letterbox bars. Fade-ins from black like the very start of Harry Potter 3 would have a sudden visible jump to grey rather than a smooth transition, and I thought that maybe the level for just above black was too high, so I turned brightness down by 1 to 49 and the grey frames were now properly “black”. The problem is that now dark scenes had slightly more posterised blacks and less visible dark details such as hairs and textures which can be seen when brightness is raised. What I assume should be gradients from dark into shadow, like dark hair, appeared more as solid grey jarring against solid black.
After some frustration I decided to try forcing Dolby Vision instead and the initial impressions were better, the beforementioned scenes with banding or flickering looked fine without the black crush from needing to lower the brightness to 49, and “black” frames were the same colour as the letterbox bars. It was a sort of “set and forget” solution, but there was a strange problem where the entire screen’s black wasn’t actually black but was a very dark ‘dirty’ grey gradient, brightest at the bottom of the screen and only really visible when the entirety of the screen was black in a pitch black room, given that one’s eyes had adjusted. The thing is, this was fixed and made “perfect” black by turning the brightness down by 1... to 49... which had the same “black crush” effect that had occurred in
HDR10. I’m confused if this is actually how it’s supposed to look, perhaps I’m being over sensitive to how the film is actually supposed to appear and I’m perceiving it as black crush. The thing is, there are clearly details present on the transfer that are imperceptible in blobs of black and it just looks sort of... wrong? Recently I realised another problem with watching in forced Dolby Vision and it’s the botched mapping of highlights, Harry Potter 4 had really weird blown out clipping and a World Cup scene which quite frankly ‘fudged’ certain character’s faces.
I decided to go back to HDR for
HDR10 and the highlights were handled much better, but I noticed some more banding and flickering in solid grey frames which looked like they should have been black (credits) even at 49. Lowering brightness another step feels like too much and there’s a visible loss of detail even in brighter scenes. I’m kind of stuck. I don’t know if the way it looked in HDR was too dark (with regards to black crush/shadow detail), or if the DV wasn’t dark enough. Any suggestions or ideas?
Are those details like hair or textures on clothes, which are there in the image, actually supposed to be seen?
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Standards ecosystem of Dolby Vision and other goodies
Way over my head.
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