Broadcast Tech p46
HDR
promises to take footage to a whole other level, capturing TV images
that offer unprecedented detail and texture even in the shadows.
The
Man in the High Castle
Amazon
Studios' alternate history of a Nazi-run United States was shot and
post produced 5K on Red Dragons.
“From
the get-go having the show look very theatrical was important to
Amazon,” explains Thor Roos, senior colourist at Deluxe-owned
Encore Vancouver. “They wanted to give this 1960s universe a
realistic feel.”
Roos
says good original photography will deliver the best results in HDR
but that the effect will reveal subtitles in everything from set
design to costume. “You can see more detail in 4K but HDR takes
this to a whole other level. You can see detail in neon lights in the
background, spectacular highlights in windows or stained glass. HDR
really shines in those moments.”
HDR
can be applied after a project's grade or, in some cases, before
colour correction but, with Encore supervising editor James Cowan,
Roos opted to grade the UHD HDR alongside a HDR rec.709 version.
“We
had a lot of creative discussion about how to approach it,” says
Cowan. “Should we grade HDR first and make the rec.709 version
match that or vice versa? We decided that rec.709 was the hero path
because ninety-nine percent of people will be looking at that. That
said, we colour corrected both deliverables side by side. We'd take
scenes and shots, evaluate them both, see which grade looked best and
select that.”
Amazon
dictated that the production use OpenEXR, an open source HDR file
format originally developed by ILM. Roos monitored the HDR path on
Sony's BVM-X300 and checked regular plasmas for rec.709 with Resolve
used for conform, colour, titles and versioning.
Cowan
estimates that the process added a third more time in the grading
suite with knock-on costs to storage and GPUs to power realtime
compute performance.
Lacking
on-set monitoring, series DPs Gonzalo Amat and James Hawkinson could
only view HDR in post but as they saw more graded rushes they began
making adjustments on set for exposure and lighting.
A
scene in the first episode depicts several characters on a bridge at
dawn watching the sun rise. “HDR made the sunrise look beautiful
while allowing us to see the actor's faces rather than being
silhouetted, which is the effect you would get with SDR,” describes
Roos.
Marco
Polo
Hired
to work as colour scientist for season 2 of ten part Netflix drama
Marco
Polo,
Dado Valentic, founder and chief colourist, Mytherapy, developed a
pipeline that enabled cinematographer Vanja Cernjul to precisely
control the HDR on location in Hungary, Slovakia and Malaysia.
Rushes
were shot on Sony F55, the same as season 1. “In order to acquire
HDR you don't need to change the camera or way of shooting provided
you have sufficient bit depth to extract the dynamic range from the
raw material,” Valentic advises.
With
no on-set monitors yet available for displaying HDR, Valentic devised
a means for Cernjul to know he was capturing enough information from
an SDR display. It's a proprietary process which Valentic won't
reveal but it meant Cernjul was able to shoot normally, confident
that the editorial team could unwrap the images and create an HDR
image from them.
“The
workflow turned a Digital Imaging Technician (who oversees on-set
data capture) into an on set colourist helping the DP to adjust the
image,” he explains.
Having
validated the look on Dolby Vision monitors before shooting, the
on-set colour metadata was ingested and tracked through Avid, and
graded and conformed on Da Vinci Resolve, retooled to function in HDR
by Blackmagic Design. A BVM-X300 monitor was used for viewing
although Valentic would like monitors that can sustain even greater
than 1000 nits of brightness.
“We're
not just conforming picture and sound but also conforming colour,”
says Valentic. This allowed Deluxe New York colorist Martin Zeichner
to finish the grade in HDR and SDR in parallel by monitoring both
outputs.
He
admits to making many mistakes with HDR in the beginning. “I
behaved like a child with a new toy,” he says. “I'm fortunate to
have worked on a project of this size in order to learn the pitfalls
– what works and what doesn't. There will be a period when everyone
is excited by what is technically possible with the image rather than
with what the emotional and creative content of the storytelling
requires.”
A
scene in Marco
Polo
features an
actress
against the backdrop of a rain storm walking from outside into a dark
room. “You would not normally be able to cover this and see all the
detail in the shadows or on her face but in HDR this is a
revelation,” relates Valentic. “DPs will no longer have to
compromise by having to select which part of the image they want us
to see.”
Good
Girls Revolt
Amazon
episodic newsroom drama Good
Girls Revolt
was shot on Red Dragon with the post route from dailies to editing
kept in rec.709.
“The
recommended practice is to start with the HDR version and extract
from it a regular HD rec.709 pass but the practical reality of TV is
that the majority of storytelling and viewership is in rec.709,”
says Pankaj Bajpai, senior colourist, Encore Hollywood. “So we
devised the aesthetics of the show in rec.709 and then did the HDR.”
Since
HDR opens up a new creative palette to producers, DPs and directors,
Bajpai feels it's the job of the colourist to marry their needs with
the current restrictions on viewing technology. “Achieving that
balance is a huge aspect of how we manage the HDR and SDR versions,”
he says.
HDR
is at its most dramatic in content with high contrast between light
and dark scenes, in explosions or on metallic objects offering
opportunities for light reflections. Science-fiction or big budget
action movies are obvious beneficiaries. Less so are low key
dialogue-heavy sequences.
“I
found that if you have a scene in a living room with two people
talking on a couch illuminated by a lamp then, in the HDR version,
the lamp will appear very bright and actually start to compete for
the viewer's attention with the actor's performance,” says Bajpai.
“We tried to keep the basic aesthetic of the show as approved in
rec.709. There isn't one scene that stands out dramatically
differently in the HDR pass but what you experience in HDR is greater
texture and depth in the shadows and midtones.”
Examples
in 1969-set Good
Girls Revolt
are the definition of the sky reflected in the glass windows of New
York skyscrapers and hotel lobby chandeliers and marble which appear
“as if you can touch them.”
No comments:
Post a Comment