Proxies blown out in but footage looks fine

Besides "hanging here" and my own work, I'm a "contibuting author" over at MixingLight.com, the big colorist's pro teaching site. The founders there were the ones that Dolby Labs hired to do the in-house demos for colorists on how to work with DolbyVision in Resolve & Baselight. So I've been around a ton of discussions & work with both SDR and HDR.

In some ways, you're kinda right ... but not really. Mostly so?  lol

There are two big things in learning to work with HDR ... the absolute biggest gain isn't dynamic range black-to-white, it's the massively increased color volume available in HDR work. And the second, is it's the shadows that benefit more from the dynamic range than the highlights. (This is where you're sorta right.)

The first, the larger color volume is easy enough to understand. The second, the increased shadow range, is at first odd. But given that realistically you only take the 'paper white' or "graphics white" to around 200-210 nits, that's about doubling the total tonal range for "detailed" objects. Everything above around 210 is simply bright color data. Speculars.

So it means you have more details in the shadows you can work with, more subtlety you can massage. And that for the colorists I know, the increased shadow subtlety is about as addictive as the bigger color Crayola box. Yea, going from the 16 color box of crayons to the 128 color box is awesome. But so is getting to do really cool shading and tinting of all those deep shadows.

There's a problem there though ... after you finish the HDR grade, when you scrunch things down for the SDR deliverable, both gains go away. One of the colorists says the biggest thing he's learned in working the few actual paid HDR gigs he's delivered is that it's easier to grade, really. You aren't always shoving 13 stops into a 7-8 stop 'screen'. Poking and jabbing here & there to make it fit. Grading HDR is in many ways more 'natural' to quite a few colorists once they get a handle on it.

But ... and its a big one ... SDR doesn't have all those tones down there, and fitting things in is bloody hard, even more so when you start out with a tone more tones. It really takes the software being able to give a pretty good transform between color spaces/range.

At the moment, it's really easier to do SDR from SDR media. It ... fits ... easier. Especially in Premiere at this time in its color managment development. Maybe in a few months they'll have transforms for this. Right now, they've a new S-log3.cine transform available for that media that's pretty awesome, I think the best color management too they've made yet.

But most other media ... their transforms and color tools work mostly. You can get by with them. So yea, you can stuff it in, but why would you want to? It's more work, and really doesn't get better results. Although ... in another year, if you're going to rework the project, it might be nice to have the extra DR and color.

So it's a user choice thing of course ... though I'm still mostly shooting SDR. Although the BRAW from my BMPCC4K can of course be normalized to Rec.709 or go directly to a P3 or Rec.2100 space. My second cam, the old beloved GH3 ... strictly SDR. So it's gonna need a replacement over the next year.

I figure at NAB in a couple weeks, I'll be looking over what's out. See if BlackMagic has any news for their cams. Or others, though probably at this point I'll go with a BM cam. Might pick up another 4k, or perhaps a 6k. Unless something else pops up.

Neil

Yes, I would totally concur with going back to the older version for this project.

Proxies ... seem to be blown right now for some media, and even I haven't figured out a way around that. If anyone DOES come up with a way to create a proxy preset that works with CM -overriden clips, PLEASE post it here!

Neil