Working with HLG footage

[Ricky Sharp]

Thank you for the research on all this Paul. Thankfully, I'm avoiding all this mess for now as I have very limited playback of such material. Also quite dissapointed with Apple in their move to 10-bit color displays, but limited to the Display P3 color space.

Currently, everything I do is based around sRGB and Rec 709 (which are pretty close to each other). That covers both my photography and videography needs. And I remain on HD for now. I was hoping the iMac Pro would have a display capable of Adobe RGB so I could finally move to that space for photography. Nope. And the HDR capability of the iMac Pro display seems to be some consumer-grade version.

So until the industry gives me a way to capture, edit and display Adobe RGB and HDR Rec 2020 material at a reasonable price, I'm staying away.

[Paul Anderegg]

I think the BlackMagic Design Mini Monitor 4K is like $200 brand new, and does HDR...if I had a 1000 nit TV, I might be tempted to pick one up.

The last video I posted, the Handbrake one, was a FCPX project, with an HDR Tools PQ to HLG effect...not what is recommended by Apple. So below, is a video clip that follows the posted guidelines from Apple and Google, on how to export and post an HDR video to YouTube. Project settings Wide Gamut HDR PQ. Project files on timeline are HLG, with HLG to PQ HDR Tools effect thrown at them to conform tomPQ timeline, as specified by Apple. HLG clips set to color space BT2020 HLG. Exported as ProRes, then converted to 10 bit h264 by Handbrake, high10 level 5.2. The result below is basically wheat you get when you take files direct from camera, in what Sony calls "Instant HDR", and throw them at YouTube instantly...looks a bit dark to me...how does it look to you?

Paul

YouTube (Short URL)

[Paul Anderegg]

Found an article written on how to take Sony S-log footage and turn it into HDR material for YouTube, using the free version of Da Vinci Resolve on a PC, or Mac I presume. The article is specific on how to use Resolve and grade on a normal SDR display.

Grading HDR Video on a Rec.709 Monitor (For YouTube & Beyond) ? Wesley Knapp

Paul

[John Nantz]

Originally Posted by Ricky Sharp

Thank you for the research on all this Paul.

+1
It has been really helpful.

The “4K HDR 10 bit h264 Handbrake transcode of ProRes LT PQ HDR/HLG” in post #30 “pops” really good. On the left side of the screen shot there is a grey-looking house with a couple a couple bright lights that shows up well, and another building just to it’s left. The clothing on the medics show up well and while their vehicle lights are bright the open door has nice detail. It seems a good compromise especially for your news reel.

With regard to the post #32, at first glance, it looks more, uh, shall we say, a bit muddy? But on the plus side the lower lights don’t look so burned out (do the upper and lower one blink alternatively?), one can still see detail in the house on the left, the medics clothes have some detail but not quite as much as in #30. For TV viewing #30 might work better, but for reality … #32???

Disclaimer: I'm no colorist.

For me, thinking out loud, this whole thing about moving to HEVC 10-bit has me a bit bummed out. Just spent the better part of a couple days searching for a video card to run H.265 on my Mac Pro 5,1 and it doesn’t look good. It appears that every option is fraught with undesirable compromises and major expense. Thinking now that I pulled the trigger too soon in selling the AX100.

[Paul Anderegg]

Agreed John, #30 was using the "wrong" HDR filter (PQ to HLG), the exact opposite of what Apple and Google expressly declare should be used with HLG footage on PQ timeline. #32 is an example of "by the book", following their explicit instructions, which as you said, looks all dark and muddy to me too. On my Samsung Galaxy S8 phone with Mobile HDR display, #30 and #32, look identical with HDR active...so go figure! All clips uploaded as 10 bit 100Mbps h264.

Sony is calling their HLG "Instant HDR", which I think you can agree, is simply NOT THE CASE. There was nothing instant about this...I have something like 20-30 test uploads over several days of trying to figure out how the heck to get working HDR material onto the primary site for user uploaded HDR content. Sony Catalyst Browse was no help, neither is Vegas 15.

For giggles, after viewing this new and amazing Sony HLG HDR material from their newest camera, take a peek at some old Z150 SDR 4K footage in this post, and I dare you to tell me the "Instant HDR" stuff looks even close to as good. :-)

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/sony-4k-...ml#post1917652

[Cary Knoop]

Originally Posted by Paul Anderegg

Grading HDR Video on a Rec.709 Monitor (For YouTube & Beyond) ? Wesley Knapp

Paul

That's just silly, you cannot grade HDR on an SDR monitor.

[Ricky Sharp]

Originally Posted by Cary Knoop

That's just silly, you cannot grade HDR on an SDR monitor.

I have to agree with Cary here. This is why for photography I'm sticking with sRGB. Until Apple comes out with a display cabable of AdobeRGB, I wouldn't be able to properly edit AdobeRGB photos. Same would hold true for video content. Just happy I at least have a 10-bit computer display now to properly see/edit 10-bit 4:2:2 HD content (Rec 709).

[John Nantz]

Ricky -

Originally Posted by Ricky Sharp

Old Mac (2012 12-Core Mac Pro, 32 GB RAM, Radeon HD 5870 1 GB).

Just wondering, with regard to your 2012 Mac Pro, do you given any thought to, or researched, updating the graphics card to handle HEVC? Trying to find someone who has been down that path is difficult and I’d be interested in anything you have to say on that subject. It’d be really nice to find an “out of the box” fix, but unfortunately, I haven’t found one yet.

Edit: In the news today was an item that said Apple Inc. is designing and making its own display screens for the first time at a secret [Ooooh... it's a secret!] facility near its California headquarters. ... testing small screens .... as it gears up for the next-generation of MicroLED screens...

[Cary Knoop]

Originally Posted by Paul Anderegg

Just wondering, with regard to your 2012 Mac Pro, do you given any thought to, or researched, updating the graphics card to handle HEVC? Trying to find someone who has been down that path is difficult and I’d be interested in anything you have to say on that subject. It’d be really nice to find an “out of the box” fix, but unfortunately, I haven’t found one yet.

NVIDIA has cards that support HEVC. The 1080ti for instance supports 10 bit hardware HEVC encoding.

You can use ffmpeg to use NVIDIA hardware encoding: use: -c:v hevc_nvenc as the video codec.
If your decoding is hardware as well (only 8 bit encoding is supported in GeForce cards) you can even run a full hardware path by specifying -hwaccel.

[Ricky Sharp]

Originally Posted by John Nantz

Ricky -

Just wondering, with regard to your 2012 Mac Pro, do you given any thought to, or researched, updating the graphics card to handle HEVC? Trying to find someone who has been down that path is difficult and I’d be interested in anything you have to say on that subject. It’d be really nice to find an “out of the box” fix, but unfortunately, I haven’t found one yet.

Sorry, but I've moved on to a 2017 10-Core iMac Pro as of December. The GPUs for Apple's pro Macs are often custom parts, so attempting to find a solution can be very tricky (never did that myself). Along with better CPU and GPU, there are often numerous other features you gain when moving to a completely new machine (e.g. newest wireless specs). I upgrade computers on average every 3 to 4 years.

[Paul Anderegg]

Yeah, Apple likes to keep even small but very useful items in reserve for the next years "model", just to push people to upgrade faster..."Well, the 2014 looks the same as the 2015, but it's got AC wireless!".

The Nvidia encoders don't have much use except for very specialized programs as far as I have seen...better off with Quicksync. From my limited research, the Nvidia encoders are about the same quality as Quicksync when transcoding at high bitrates, but the Nvidias go to crap as you force any serious compression on them.

Paul

[Paul Anderegg]

So I guess I found the issue with my HLG exports from FCPX. Even though FCPX has a selection for HDR HLG projects, it will NOT EXPORT them as HDR files...FTW. The only option is a full PQ transformation.

[Paul Anderegg]

And after even more testing, here is some additional useful data about the uselessness of HLG.

Exported raw Z90 HLG MXF HDR file directly to YouTube...it accepted it, but says "Sorry, not HDR".

I then used Catalyst Browse to transcode the raw XAVC-L HLG clip to both 8 bit XAVC-S and 10 bit XAVC-Intra...both did not receive any HDR metadata, meaning not only were they not able to flag as HDR on YouTube, they also fail to be recognized as HDR clips in FCPX, even if I wanted to convert to PQ.

So Catalyst Browse doesn't pass HDR metadata when transcoding...nice to know Sony is doing a bang up job on the "Instant HDR" front. It is worth noting that Catalyst Browse is full of the word HLG, BT202, HDR etc, but these don't seem to have any real world application or meaning. :-|

Paul

[Paul Anderegg]

How about some Da Vinci Resolve 14 tests? You asked for it, well, not really, but here are the results.

Utter failure. Used the YouTube HDR guide, which BTW states that YouTube accepts HLG...set all the HLG settings and project as specified by YouTube. Exported out as 10 bit HEVC in Resolve, then uploaded to YouTube. FAIL...no HDR flag. The 7 second HEVC export took 11 minutes.

For those not aware, you can shoot S-log on the Z90 and render it on a PQ timeline to make HDR. Since any HDR content you must create at this time seems to REQUIRE PQ, it would seem to make much much more sense to just shoot S-log instead of this hybrid REC709 gamma with some HDR log highlights, since HLG is not really looking usable at this point.

Anyone care to test Premier Pro? I would download the trial version of it but at this time I have too much of a headache to continue tonight.

YouTube (Short URL)

[Paul Anderegg]

Resolve HLG to REC709 2.2 gamma h264 conversion...for the curious wondering how the "works on SDR TV's!" part of HLG looks. Note blown out highlights.

YouTube (Short URL)