HDR is crayons

[WBMakeVMarsMovieNOW]

Originally Posted by Trekkie313

Shame CRT's could never get bigger or lighter. They happen to be great for HDR heavy video games, I imagine they'd be the same for movies.

they did get much better blacks and all than LCD

but with OLED now don't see the need, that is sharper and has even deeper blacks and richer color (although OLED does burn in too easily)

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by Cliff

Agreed... I'm not anti-HDR at all, but I think people have a tendency to become slaves to the tech while also having a fundamental misunderstanding of that which they are enslaving themselves to. I'm a massive proponent of OAR (and have been since the 80s), but I roll my eyes so far I get headaches every time I see someone complain about 1:85:1 films being presented in 1.78:1. It shows a fundamental lack of understanding about what an OAR actually is. I've said for many years now that theater screens are like snowflakes... no two are exactly the same (which was especially true during the decades of film). You could see the same movie in two different auditoriums right next to each other and both would be framed slightly differently. Hell, I worked at a theater in the mid-late 80s that had to have it's screen maskings for scope and flat adjusted by hand. But people approach art like it's science. They obsess about the tech and never give much thought to the technique. Look at Gremlins, both the old Blu-ray and the new UHD are both framed at 1.78:1, but each is framed quite differently, sometimes WILDLY differently. So to me... HDR is like OAR... as look as it helps and doesn't hinder- I'm on-board. But in the same way you can overcrop a film to the point of distraction (like the old Apocalypse Now and Tucker 2:1 framing, you can "overcrop" the visual texture of a movie and push it so that it doesn't look like the film you know (I think Batman 89's HDR pass makes it look garish and unpleasant).

The key to me is moderation... enhance, but not at the expense of the original artistry.

I'm one who used to complain about 1.85 films opened up to 1.78 on Blu and/or on TV, but Robert A. Harris wrote that he didn't think it was a big deal and if he didn't think anything of it, I certainly couldn't complain about it anymore.

And of course you're perfectly correct that projection in theaters (and even in screening rooms) is highly inaccurate and therefore projected AR varies from screen to screen. One of the reasons for this is that projection lenses are generally only made in inch focal lengths and they frequently have to use a smaller focal length than ideal, which makes the image larger and then it needs to be cropped. (FW=DA where the focal length of the lens in inches * the width of the screen image in feed = the distance from the screen in feet * the aperture of the image in inches.) Even the Dolby theater I go to cuts off the bottom of the image.

However, occasionally I do see some shows made for TV that are indeed 1.85. The third season of Stranger Things was 1.85 and even though it's only a few pixels different, it does seem more cinematic to me.

As for HDR, at least insofar as new productions are concerned and projected in a Dolby Theater, I think it looks fabulous and every bit as good if not even better than 70mm did back in the day. "Joker" (AR 1.85) looked absolutely fantastic in Dolby Vision. Applying HDR to an old film is indeed another matter, but I would guess that there are some cases where it might work and others where it wouldn't.

[nick4Knight]

"Applying HDR to older films" is a subjective and inaccurate way to frame it. Yet again people are oversimplifying one concept of this argument to skip right over the MOST simple of concepts to grasp...

That being SDR rec. 709 is no chance to most accurately display 4K OCN scan data -- There is no point to advocate for anything but HDR (as that's the agreed upon 10-bit deliverable) as a tool to get the best outcome at that point you realize this truth.

[Farerb]

"Debunking HDR" by Steve Yedlin

https://www.yedlin.net/DebunkingHDR/...d05qoQNVTcOeCw

Thought people might be interested in this...