Do the Right Thing 4K UHD (1989)

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by reedzkee

I'm pretty tech savvy but was never a tv tech nerd until recently.

I assumed HDR (especially Dolby Vision) was a marketing gimmick until seeing 4k BluRays on my friends LG C9. I assumed if the TV was good and the source material is good, why would there be a need an "enhancement" layer ?

I work in audio and am very anti enhancement in that domain. Speakers/room/source are 99.9% of what makes something sound good, at least for linear narrative stuff like movies. I figured it would be the same for video.

It's just a name. They don't mean "enhancement" in the sense of bolting on something that's extraneous to the video signal, it's there to rebuild the HDR10 base layer into an approximation of the Dolby Vision master which is usually the de facto (and often filmmaker approved) source of the HDR grade.

HDR is different from SDR, yes, so in that sense it's "enhancing" the image in a way that SDR couldn't do, but here's the kicker: HDR doesn't show anything that wasn't there already on the raw, ungraded source material (camera negative, raw video files). In audio terms it's akin to going back to the master tapes and re-recording them with more dynamic range and bit depth than a previous recording. Whether we were meant to see/hear every last morsel that's on the source material is another question entirely...