Quote:
Originally Posted by Kris Deering
I think Vincent brings up some good points and that his intentions and heart are definitely in the right place (the overall enjoyment level of all consumers).
The thing that has me scratching my head with all of this is how the industry as a whole didn't see all of these issues coming a million miles away when you have nearly the EXACT same problem with high dynamic range music recordings. The parallel issues are nearly identical and what fruit did that bare: the loudness wars and today's extremely compressed pop music. And what Vincent mentions is moving toward exactly that. If you bring the average level up and up to essentially make up for either the noise floor (the room) or the playback devices limitations, you are compressing higher and higher and effectively limiting the overall dynamic range simply so the average is high and you still get an occasional high point on top of that. Because of the way light is perceived, you will reach a point of saturation if you keep raising APL (even though I agree with the reasons why it essentially needs to be done).
All of this could have been avoided if the powers that be had not decided on an absolute luminance system that is designed for a viewing condition that rarely exists in the mass market. But just like I don't think compression in music BY DEFAULT is the right answer, I also don't feel the same about video because then you are compromising the presentation of those with the right environment and displays. Rather, I would like to see CE companies come up with different "on the fly" compression schemes to help when you are in this type of situation (Panasonic has already done this with its dynamic range slider). That way the full dynamic range is preserved (even if the filmmakers don't want to make their HDR grades really bright) in the recording. Otherwise I can see this going the same way as audio. We'll start seeing more and more compressed presentations that are bright, bright, bright! but the true videophiles will start to understand the compromises of that and a side market will be created down the line for $$$ that offer the full dynamic range as intended without the compression. The wheel just keeps on a turning.
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Yes but Vincent is saying that this stuff is way too dim and dull, not that it's "bright bright bright!".
If anything we might start getting studios doing exactly what you're suggesting, hiking the APL something chronic - Warners already did this with something like The Meg - as a riposte
to these complaints of HDR stuff being perennially dark dark dark....but which still actually has an appreciable increase in dynamic range, unlike the aforementioned Meg which is bright AF but doesn't often have a significantly expanded range over and above the SDR Blu-ray, particularly in exterior shots. Something like Pacific Rim (~2400 nit MaxCLL) is the epitome of what I'd call "fake HDR" as it's brighter than hell but doesn't increase the highlight range worth a jot over the SDR Blu-ray, and as such the tone mapping in some TVs can actually make the highlights clip badly vs the SDR Blu-ray, because x TV thinks it's okay to roll off highlights above 1000 nits or 1500 nits when in actuality the SDR highlight range is being parked right into that upper brightness range that's being rolled off. (I do still like the UHD of PR though as it undoes the massive black crush of the SDR version, and as I've got a display that doesn't clip it to balls then that's a bonus
)
[edit] Speaking of clipping when something is pushed too hot: the analogy to the audio world is very apt. Just like when you get a track with a lot of dynamic range played on something that can't handle it, they have to turn it up to hear the quiet parts and then crank it waaaay down when the loud part starts. Same applies with poor HDR performance and/or poor tone mapping: people can't see the visually 'quiet' parts ("It's too dull and dim!")
but the problem is that they can't turn brightness up to compensate because the backlight is maxed out already, such are the demands of the absolute luminance system.
But I say again that I'd personally place the onus to "fix" this problem on the CE industry as a whole, rather than nuking the content to compensate solely for the lowest common denominator because then that really DOES mean a return to the loudness wars, only in visual form, and I'd ****ing hate it if that happened. If only there was some sort of "dynamic" content-derived tone mapping system, akin to changing the volume on the fly, that was built in from the start to help mitigate this? Nah, what a crazy notion.
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responsible for producing the recently released milestone ITU-R BT.2100). Anyway, during the discussions in that particular spring meeting, committee members expressed much skepticism about the value or need for having a TV capable of higher brightness and deeper black levels. The working party did not accept this objective based proposal (containing measurements, numbers, graphs) partly because there was not an appreciation that increased dynamic range would have value in a new TV system and partly because it was too new (visionary/revolutionary).
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