HDR heatmaps and torch mode UHDs

[UFAlien]

Demons
Synapse - USA Standalone Release
Dèmoni
HDR Formats: HDR10 and Dolby Vision MEL

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,412 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 443 nits
Max Peak Brightness in DV Metadata: 1,001 nits
Max Frame Average in DV Metadata: 92 nits

A pretty fantastic looking release all around - impeccably sharp and filmic. Optical process shots and composites are obviously a bit softer, but even then, in the opening credits, you can make out the edges of the clear cels used to place the text over the image! HDR is used in a surprisingly subtle fashion - enough that, going through manually and selecting screenshots in part based on what I thought would be brightest, I didn't catch anything all that close to the measured peaks. Still, you can see it poking out of the essentially-SDR range in a couple places in my caps for small highlights, and subjectively, watching it in a dark room on my OLED, it never looked like it was unnaturally dim or lacking contrast.

What's not subtle at all is the use of the wide color gamut. It's mastered in the P3 space, not Rec. 2020 - which doesn't really matter with current display tech anyway. But it really uses the full potential of that P3 space in a manner befitting of the hyper-stylized Italo-horror look. The colors are deep and vibrant and really pop. It's like gore-soaked eye candy. An easy recommendation for fans of the film or corny 80s spaghetti spookers.

HDR brightness plot:


Dolby Vision Metadata plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[Macatouille]

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

Mastering display luminance              : min: 0.0050 cd/m2, max: 4000 cd/m2
Maximum Content Light Level              : 1744 cd/m2
Maximum Frame-Average Light Level        : 1036 cd/m2

Heatmaps (Album)

[Show spoiler]

Gamut Visualizations (Album)

[Show spoiler]

Tonemapped Screenshots (Album)

[Show spoiler]

Plots (HDR10, Dolby Vision, Bitrate)


Past Posts

[Macatouille]

Strongest captured highlight was 763 nits, whole frame was 96:



WCG usage is pretty common but never more so than the night-vision POV shots at the start of the movie. They're almost completely in P3 and Rec.2020:

[UFAlien]

The Amityville Horror (2005)
Shout! Studios - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10 and Dolby Vision FEL

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,016 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 647 nits
Max Peak Brightness in DV Metadata: 905 nits
Max Frame Average in DV Metadata: 222 nits

This transfer is a scan of a film-out from the 2K digital intermediate. With that in mind it looks quite good. Obviously it's a lot softer than a true "native" 4K presentation, with grain that's a bit "blobby" instead of pin-sharp, but it's quite filmic looking without signs of troublesome processing. That is, outside of the processing already done for the DI to give it the super-stylized, high-contrast look that was so in vogue at the time. Highlight delineation is surprisingly quite good, but there are plenty of crushed blacks to be found - so far as I can tell it's no flaw of the disc's, just how the movie was supposed to look.

The movie is very short - 81 minutes excluding the end credit scroll - so compression isn't a problem even on the 66 GB disc. I didn't notice any significant artifacting during my watch-through or in the process of getting screenshots. I did do some comparisons between the base layer and the Dolby Vision enhancement layer baked-in, and even with careful pixel-peeping they were virtually indistinguishable.

There's a nice wide range of HDR brightness, and some strong P3 colors - especially blues. In a couple of shots they bleed slightly into Rec. 2020 space, although the metadata says it was mastered in P3. 8-bit rounding errors actually aren't in play here as one of the clearest examples - the shot of Ryan Reynolds sitting next to a film projector - is from a full-bit-depth cap.

If you enjoy the movie this is a very solid presentation of it.

HDR brightness plot:


Dolby Vision Metadata plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[BigBMaster]

Originally Posted by UFAlien

The Amityville Horror (2005)
Shout! Studios - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10 and Dolby Vision FEL

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,016 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 647 nits
Max Peak Brightness in DV Metadata: 905 nits
Max Frame Average in DV Metadata: 222 nits

This transfer is somewhat confusingly described on the back of the box as a "new 4K scan from the original DI film negative," which is a kind of weaselly way of saying it's a scan of an internegative filmed out from the 2K digital intermediate. With that in mind it looks quite good. Obviously it's a lot softer than a true 4K presentation, with grain that's a bit "blobby" instead of pin-sharp, but it's quite filmic looking without signs of troublesome processing. That is, outside of the processing already done for the DI to give it the super-stylized, high-contrast look that was so in vogue at the time. Highlight delineation is surprisingly quite good, but there are plenty of crushed blacks to be found - so far as I can tell it's no flaw of the disc's, just how the movie was supposed to look.

The movie is very short - 81 minutes excluding the end credit scroll - so compression isn't a problem even on the 66 GB disc. I didn't notice any significant artifacting during my watch-through or in the process of getting screenshots. I did do some comparisons between the base layer and the Dolby Vision enhancement layer baked-in, and even with careful pixel-peeping they were virtually indistinguishable.

There's a nice wide range of HDR brightness, and some strong P3 colors - especially blues. In a couple of shots they bleed slightly into Rec. 2020 space, although the metadata says it was mastered in P3. 8-bit rounding errors actually aren't in play here as one of the clearest examples - the shot of Ryan Reynolds sitting next to a film projector - is from a full-bit-depth cap.

If you enjoy the movie this is a very solid presentation of it.

HDR brightness plot:


Dolby Vision Metadata plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

There’s nothing “weasily” about the way the transfer is marketed. It’s a 4K scan from the 35mm DI negative film out, which is not an internegative. That’s misleading on your part. It’s the best source element that MGM had to offer. They didn’t have the 2K DI files.

[UFAlien]

Originally Posted by BigBMaster

There’s nothing “weasily” about the way the transfer is marketed. It’s a 4K scan from the 35mm DI negative film out, which is not an internegative. That’s misleading on your part. It’s the best source element that MGM had to offer. They didn’t have the 2K DI files.

Thank you for the clarification; the post's been edited. Evidently I misunderstood the definition of "internegative."

[Macatouille]

Bound (2004)

Mastering display luminance              : min: 0.0001 cd/m2, max: 1000 cd/m2

Heatmaps (Album)

[Show spoiler]

Gamut Visualizations (Album)

[Show spoiler]

Tonemapped Screenshots (Album)

[Show spoiler]

Plots (HDR10, Dolby Vision, Bitrate)


Past Posts

[Macatouille]

This is a very conservative HDR grade, with a MaxCLL of just 218 nits and a MaxFALL of 119. I didn't capture anything stronger than 143 nits and 6.5:



From what I can tell, WCG usage is limited to small details around the periphery too.

Having said all that, I watched this projected a couple nights ago and thought it looked great. Sumptuous even. Not everything needs to be a light cannon, you know?

[BorisKarloffice]

I know Collateral has been covered already but I'd be curious to see analysis of the other UHDs done for movies shot in 8-bit rec709. There are at least three I'm aware of: Attack of the Clones, The Raid: Redemption, and the upcoming Kino release of The Visit.

Strangely enough all four got DolbyVision encodes.

[thejoeman2]

Can't express how much I love this thread. Puts HDR and what it does to the video in perspective.

[BorisKarloffice]

Originally Posted by thejoeman2

Can't express how much I love this thread. Puts HDR and what it does to the video in perspective.

If there's one thing I've learned from this thread it's that they did a really good job with the 709 standard over 30 years ago because look at how many releases still fall almost entirely within that color gamut and dynamic range.

[UFAlien]

Silver Bullet
Shout Studios - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10, Dolby Vision FEL

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,552 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 412 nits
Max Peak Brightness in DV Metadata: 974 nits
Max Frame Average in DV Metadata: 83 nits

A very nice presentation. This is a grainy film, but I didn’t notice any compression artifacts in the grain field watching in Dolby Vision and even my screenshots of the base layer didn’t show any obvious defects in that regard. The HDR grade is quite good, with a wide range and some very bright specular highlights and emissive light sources. Skies and the like are never overly bright and the darkness is suitably dark. Skin tones sometimes seemed a little bit too saturated to me, but not in a very distracting way. Colors really pop in general, with the wide color getting a workout and pushing into Rec. 2020 space repeatedly – the main character’s red jacket actually sometimes maxes out the red saturation in that huge color space! If only the werewolf effects looked as good as the transfer…

This is another title with a really big gap between the measured peak brightness levels and the Dolby Vision metadata, so the DV stream is trying to balance overall brightness with highlight retention for displays where tone mapping is needed.

HDR brightness plot:


Dolby Vision Metadata plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[UFAlien]

King Kong (1976)
Paramount steelbook - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10, Dolby Vision FEL

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 938 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 517 nits
Max Peak Brightness in DV Metadata: 341 nits
Max Frame Average in DV Metadata: 75 nits

It's not a secret that Paramount's UHD releases sometimes have encoding issues, but this is by far the worst example I've personally seen. Every time there's a decently-sized bright area of the image, it falls apart into a compressed mess where the grain field in that part of the image is either eliminated or reduced to blocky noise. The Dolby Vision layer provides some improvement, but it's nowhere near enough to save this one. As an example, linked here are two full-sized, uncompressed shots - one of the HDR10 base layer and then one with the Dolby Vision layer baked in. All I've done is tone-map them into 8-bit and crop out the letterbox bars:



This isn't the worst-looking shot in the movie, but it's the best example caught in my automated Dolby Vision baker pass. Entire scenes look like you're streaming the movie with an inadequate bitrate; the initial arrival on Skull Island is the most egregious as the encoding completely fails to keep up with the thick white fog the characters are traveling through. The opening titles, with the ship under a big open bright sky, are similarly awful.

Sometimes it looks okay. When compression cooperates, highlight delineation and fine detail are considerably improved over the previous Shout Factory Blu-ray release. Darker scenes generally look better, so the climactic chaos in New York - which in this version takes place entirely at night - is better than much of the earlier bits. That's not saying much though, especially in HDR10. The color balance also tends to look better in night scenes, as a lot of the daylight sequences have a slightly sickly-looking green-yellow tint to them. This isn't as severe as it evidently was on the European UHD release from StudioCanal, but that one was competently encoded, so pick your poison.

HDR is present and fine but relatively reserved, with only a handful of moments that break the 600-nit barrier, none of which I caught in any screenshots. Subjectively, watching the film, highlights sometimes stand out in dark scenes but there's not much "pop" overall. Not a deal-breaker of course, especially for a catalogue title shot on film that wasn't intended as an HDR experience to begin with. The P3 color gamut gets some moderate usage to expand some of the more saturated tones.

Dolby Vision metadata here is pretty conservative with its tone mapping, the max value peaking at less than half of the actual peak image brightness, so it prioritizes overall image brightness over highlight detail for low-nit displays. Probably a good idea given that the movie is frequently pretty dark.

HDR brightness plot:


Dolby Vision Metadata plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[TbeRw01]

This is yet another title where the Dolby Vision metadata is surprisingly inaccurate, reporting a peak brightness much less than half of the measured value. I'm noting this as a curiosity more than anything, as it doesn't seem to affect the viewing experience, at least on my setup. I tried watching the same scene with my player's Dolby Vision output enabled and disabled, and the Dolby Vision output didn't look any dimmer - though the even worse encoding on the HDR10 base layer definitely stood out.

It's because Dolby recently introduced analysis tuning , which allows the colorist to adjust the aggressiveness of the tone mapping.
I did a sample that compare the tuning here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pii...usp=drive_link
and here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IXR...usp=drive_link

the Dolby Vision output didn't look any dimmer

It's the opposite, lower values than the content means less tone mapping/brighter image but potentially clipped highlights.
For example, setting L1 to 100nits for the whole movie would just tell the TV not to apply any tone mapping.

https://professionalsupport.dolby.co...language=en_US

[UFAlien]

Originally Posted by TbeRw01

It's because Dolby recently introduced analysis tuning , which allows the colorist to adjust the aggressiveness of the tone mapping.

Interesting! So even before the refinement of the analysis process, would lower numbers in the DV metadata have had the same effect of allowing more clipping of highlights as a brightness tradeoff? I've definitely seen the "mismatch" in discs released before late 2023.

[TbeRw01]

Originally Posted by UFAlien

Interesting! So even before the refinement of the analysis process, would lower numbers in the DV metadata have had the same effect of allowing more clipping of highlights as a brightness tradeoff? I've definitely seen the "mismatch" in discs released before late 2023.

Yes, lower metadata values always mean less mapping, and a brighter image. Dolby Algo is constantly evolving and the new tunings are just the latest Dolby updates. They can also cap the metadata to 1000 or 4000nits which is the case in ''Silver Bullet''

The earliest versions produced quite different metadata too and there wasn't any floor for the values. Then they updated the cmv2.9 algo with a floor (min values) for the average_pq(2.5nits) and max_pq metadata(100nits) and a maximum of 0.000262nits(12 in pq) for the min_pq.

In Cmv4.0, they upped the average_pq floor to 10nits but the algo was VERY conservative (darker) and way too sensitive to detail-less specular and noise/artifacts.

Then in 2023, they introduced the tunings which gave more control to the colorist and improved the tone mapping a LOT.

I did a metadata comparison of the old cmv2.9 cmv4.0 algo versions here. (this comp doesn't include the new tunings)

[UFAlien]

Originally Posted by TbeRw01

Yes, lower metadata values always mean less mapping, and a brighter image. Dolby Algo is constantly evolving and the new tunings are just the latest Dolby updates. They can also cap the metadata to 1000 or 4000nits which is the case in ''Silver Bullet''

The earliest versions produced quite different metadata too and there wasn't any floor for the values. Then they updated the cmv2.9 algo with a floor (min values) for the average_pq(2.5nits) and max_pq metadata(100nits) and a maximum of 0.000262nits(12 in pq) for the min_pq.

In Cmv4.0, they upped the average_pq floor to 10nits but the algo was VERY conservative (darker) and way too sensitive to detail-less specular and noise/artifacts.

Then in 2023, they introduced the tunings which gave more control to the colorist and improved the tone mapping a LOT.

I did a metadata comparison of the old cmv2.9 cmv4.0 algo versions here. (this comp doesn't include the new tunings)

Cool, that clears up one of my biggest questions about the format! Thanks for the info.

[mrtickleuk]

Originally Posted by TbeRw01

Yes, lower metadata values always mean less mapping, and a brighter image. Dolby Algo is constantly evolving and the new tunings are just the latest Dolby updates. They can also cap the metadata to 1000 or 4000nits which is the case in ''Silver Bullet''

The earliest versions produced quite different metadata too and there wasn't any floor for the values. Then they updated the cmv2.9 algo with a floor (min values) for the average_pq(2.5nits) and max_pq metadata(100nits) and a maximum of 0.000262nits(12 in pq) for the min_pq.

In Cmv4.0, they upped the average_pq floor to 10nits but the algo was VERY conservative (darker) and way too sensitive to detail-less specular and noise/artifacts.

Then in 2023, they introduced the tunings which gave more control to the colorist and improved the tone mapping a LOT.

I did a metadata comparison of the old cmv2.9 cmv4.0 algo versions here. (this comp doesn't include the new tunings)

Thankyou so much for all this fantastic technical info.

As the owner of a LG C8, which doesn't have CMv4.0, and can only do CMv2.9 (not that there's a stark change between them) as used on 4k Blu-ray which will never change*, I do find Dolby's use of the term "Legacy" to describe CMv4.0, and not CMv2.9, quite insulting. And also baffling. If CMv4.0 is what they are now calling "Legacy", what on Earth are they describing CMv2.9 as, I wonder?!


(It was my understanding that they said they would not change the 4k Blu-Ray spec to allow CM4.0. Players would all need updates etc.)

[TbeRw01]

Ahah, true!
The majority of the movies are done in CMV4.0 but delivered in cmv2.9 for the bluray disc and as you said not a single bluray player supports cmv4.0 so it doesn't matter if your TV only supports the old version.

The Level 1 metadata are the same in 4.0 or 2.9 so all the TV also gets the improved metadata from these new analysis tunings for better tone mapping

FYI, the Ugoos AM6B+ with CoreELEC (and other devices) support Profile 7 FEL + CMV4.0 and it's possible to take the CMV4.0 bloc from streaming services and restore it back to the CMV2.9 Profile 7 RPU and get the best of both world. I do that for all the movies and it looks amazing.

[UFAlien]

Godzilla Minus One
Toho - USA (Standard Edition)
G -1.0
HDR Formats: HDR10, Dolby Vision FEL

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 8,226 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 1,743 nits
Max Peak Brightness in DV Metadata: 889 nits
Max Frame Average in DV Metadata: 86 nits

Now these are some aggressively bright highlights! Thankfully the movie overall isn't torched out, as average brightness levels are perfectly fine. 8.2 thousand nits is a pretty crazy-high peak, and in one of the caps below you'll see a value of over 9.7 thousand reported, but given that appears to be one or two pixels out of an 8-bit screencap as opposed to the full 10-bit stream being analyzed I'm gonna chalk that up to a rounding error. How much does it really matter when no TV can display either value anyway? The Dolby Vision metadata is set up to have displays clip a lot instead of trying to tone-map the whole scene down from those crazy peaks, which certainly seems to be the right approach; in all honesty from looking at the raw caps I took most of the really bright stuff doesn't have any detail in it to clip anyway.

The movie is graded to avoid true blacks, possibly in an attempt to suggest a "vintage" film print look to go with the setting. It was sometimes mildly distracting to me on my OLED, especially in scenes like the prologue where much of the screen is filled with featureless dark grey space. It's a minor nitpick if anything though, and almost certainly an intentional creative choice.

Metadata for the disc says the feature is mastered in Rec. 2020, but I didn't find any evidence of it exceeding the P3 color space. It does use P3 though, and it's not an especially colorful, saturated movie by design.

Overall, it's a very good looking release with plenty of HDR pop.

HDR brightness plot:


Dolby Vision Metadata plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization: