HDR 203 vs HDR 300

Good questions to ask. First, colorists are taught you grade to The Standard, as you can never outguess the screens your content will be seen on. By adhering to the tightest calibrated/profiled grading situation you can, you do the best diligence to see that your media looks within normal professional media appearances on every screen out there.

And that's all you can do. No one will ever!!!!! ... under any circumstances, see exactly what you see while doing your color correction. That can never be the point, as it is physically impossible for your image to exactly appear on another screen.

Most TVs do a full remapping of content to their physical capabilities. Of course, they probably also throw in some crud in their attempt to "enhance the viewing experience". And for some parts of image management, do it quite well. For instance, upscaling is normally far less notable when done by a TV displaying 1280p content on a UHD screen, than by typical upscaling within an NLE from 1280 to 3840.

And the better screens at this time, for handling HDR, do a pretty good job of managing dynamic range within the screen's capabilities. But then, the majority of screens still don't actually do HDR, though that will change over the next couple years. And there is simply no way to out-guess what "most" screens will do with your content.

Realistically, most TVs can't produce much above 600 nits if they can actually hit that. And they tend not to be able to display full blacks if they're being tasked with much high-brightness pixel data. So, often, we can't have our cake and eat it too, to borrow an old saying.

A large part of the aisle-way discussions "in the background" among colorists, is what is actually the proper top end data to use at this time. And of course, how high capable a high-DR screen do you really need to have to grade properly. If the upper practical limit on peak brightness for the vast majority of high-end consumer devices is 600 nits, and your cl.ients are specifiying only getting to that, why do you need a 2,000 to 4,000 nit screen for grading? Or even 1,000 nits? Great question that!

The last conversations I've been through have been talking about how some Netflix type things are still aiming for peak nits to be up to 1,000 nits ... but that only for absolute image spikes on some tent-pole shows ... and in general, keeping most image content below 600 nits. Some of the folks doing broadcast, that is finally getting into HDR, say they have to keep everything under 600 nits at this time.

Corporate web specs tend to be 600 or less.

And again, the data between 200 and 600 is simply brightly colored light specks for the most part. A general comment about HDR is that it isn't the highlights that are so wonderful, it's expanding the shadows from 0-20 nits in SDR to 0-50 nits in HDR. As it allows much finer gradations of shadow tones than possible in SDR.

Multiple LUTs used essentially as nodes ... that is a most intriguing setup! And while I know one could build a process to do that, as it has been done of course, I'm glad a colorist built it for you. That process requires much testing and deconstruction of the effects not only of each LUT, but when used in specific processes against another LUT. The interactions would be amazingly complex. Even with a decade working both in Premiere and Resolve, and as much time as I've had listening to, and working with, major colorists, I wouldn't even attempt to build that workflow. (And yes, I'd rather some of my colorist acquaintances built that for me over others ... )

Color management and processes are incredibly complex, and as frustrating as they are complex. One thing to keep in mind is this: no camera or monitor ever captures or sees color. They only capture and display brightnesses. Period. And that applies to both film capture and digital.

Complex processes in capture, encoding, internal mathematical calculations and processes, and similar processes at the end, the display side, create brightnesses our eye/brain visual system interprets as color. Hues.

But every human has different color/hue/brightness sensitivities and capabilities. One can look at a screen and say this wall is tinting towards magenta, and the equally trained person next to them says no, it's toward green. Both are right, for their brain's functions, but when a colorist has them as the two clients sitting side by side in-suite during a grading session, this ... is a massive pain point.