ARD-ZDF HDF02a-1.1 Profile - Color Range in MXF Metadata (colour_range_Original)

Question

Dear Community.

When I export a file using the ARD-ZDF HDF02a-1.1 Profile preset the MXF file has (among others) the following meta data (in MediaInfo):

Color range : Limited
colour_range_Original : Full

The file itself is encoded in "Legal Range" (like every common YUV encoded strem), but FFmpeg for example seems to interpret these files als "Full Range" (Premiere, Resolve are fine). As a result, all trancodes are "wrong" (lifted blacks/lower highlights). The "_Original" flags are the one from the stream, the tags witout the "_Original" are the flags of the container as far as I know.

Where does the "_Original" flag come from? In my test the source was a ProRes (444 and 422HQ) file (Legal Range).

Of course I am able to fix this issue during transcoding in FFmpeg, but sometimes I don't have the choice.

To sum up: is the "colour_range_Original : Full" correct and necessary on ARD-ZDF HDF02a-1.1 Profile files?

eckiAMETeam · Answer

The original AVCI 50/100 specification in 2005 had a mistake, requiring the full range flag to be set in the bitstream even though the content is always legal range.  The solution is to make sure the wrapper is marked as limited range, and for applications to interpret the decode range according to the wrapper, not the bitstream.  Professional media applications have been aware of this specification glitch for ages and have handled it correctly. If we were to export AVCI 50/100 with the full range flag set to false, it would not conform to the spec, and many media validation tools would fail the file.

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