HDR type video.

[Eric Stemen]

Hey guys, thought I would share some video that has an HDR style effect on it.
It's a little over the top, but I decided to be less subtle and let the colors explode.
One of my free time projects I recorded last year.

YouTube - Autocross Louisville Kentucky HDR

[Gabe Spangler]

This doesn't look like HDR. It actually looks like the opposite - the dynamic range has been reduced. It simply looks like really contrasty footage that had some stock Photoshop-type artistic filters applied to it. No offense.

[Eric Stemen]

No offense taken. I still think it looks more like HDR although it's not really HDR. Check out the last 3 seconds of the video. You can see see a clip that has the effect and a few frames that doesn't have the effect.
Thanks for checking it out and leaving a comment though!

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

It's not a bad effort however crushed blacks and blown highlights are not HDR. HDR does not mean saturated colors either.

[Eric Stemen]

Upon further reading do you think tone mapping is more the correct term for this?

Tone mapping - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Jon Wolding]

I think it's a pretty good mimic of a particularly high-detail tonemap.

The only problem is the lack of latitude within the blocks of color. Some parts of the images look too cartoonish to pass off as HDR (like FxFactory's "cartoon" effect or whatever).

I don't particularly like overdone HDR (like what this vid seems to be mimicking), but it's a subjective thing.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Tone mapping is just one of the techniques of HDR. The end result is to boost dynamic range and push towards HDR. A sentence from the wikipedia source:

Reducing dynamic range with tone mapping is often useful in bright sunlit scenes, where the difference in intensity between direct illumination and shadow is great. In these cases the global contrast of the scene is reduced, but the local contrast maintained, while the image as a whole continues to look natural. Use of tone mapping in this context may not be apparent from the final image.

Eric, in short, it only works if you have captured the full dynamic range to begin with (as in using a beamsplitter to capture live action).

In your case, the end result is a badly color graded result since the greatness in contrast is highlighted rather than subdued. If you still have to do it, though, at the very least, you will have to roto out and replace the sky.