Well, hello there! 😉
Around "here", there's not a lot of experience with HDR, so one doesn't expect a lot of knowledge ... you have more what I'd expect on the BlackMagic forums ... very nice to hear!
HDR is so mis-conceived nearly across the board, and Steve Yedlin had a recent hour-plus presentation on his thoughts you can find on YouTube, and although some of my colorist buds have differences with him on some things, they do think in general his comments make much sense.
Among other things, he would vastly prefer that we thought of dynamic range as not one or the other, just ... a variable range. With everything always seen as a percentage of max. And then any device would simply set the 'max' at the device's max brightness, and all other values would be in their appropriate relative place.
I think that would actually be far simpler ... and it is really one of the best ways to approach grading HDR. A colorist bud notes he's got a few issues with Yedlin's comments ... but then adds, as a practical thing, that he grades HDR pretty much as Yedlin suggests to just grade media ... forgetting "the silliness of nomenclature".
He grades with a full panel, and on a nice new Flanders HDR monitor ... and realistically, when grading, he's watching his scopes monitor primarily noted both waveform and RGB parade ... and it sounds like in just 10 bit mode. Now, he has Resolve set for what his max brightness is expected to be, depending on the deliverable specs, somewhere between 600 and 2,000 nits.
Realistically, 1,000 nits is practically the top you probably will ever need. And it's only for reflections off glass surfaces or water, or direct bright light sources. For anything with detail in it, that is going to be 200 nits max. Which is why the practical suggestion is the "graphics white" at 203 nits. It's just above where the brightest things with details will be.
Now for your setup, most "newish" cameras when recording log record plenty of DR to cover up to 200 nits or more. Whether it was "recorded" as HDR or not. But note, that's only about double the range we deal with in SDR/Rec.709 stuff. So realistically you are only going from maxing at 100 nits to maxing at 200 nits, with "overhead" allowed for ultra-bright reflections.
Even some 19 bit Rec.709 color space media can be stretched to cover the 200 nits max normal brightness perfectly acceptably.
So you are not going to be grading expecting to see much content above 200 nits ... period.
The biggest gain in HDR work, for many colorists, is fine control, details, and subtlety ... in the shadows!
Grading with the scopes in HLG but using a 10 bit scale doesn't restrict the top values any more than using the HLG scale for the scopes does. That only affects the scale used to denote the specific points, not the range black to white. You are not grading in SDR when doing this. Your space is the HLG setting.
You do get a lot wider view of what you're doing in 10 bit scale rather than their current HDR scale. Because they insist that the thing is set up in essentially a log format. Look at the scopes in HDR scale ... remember, your top normal value will be 200 nits?
Where is 200 nits on the scopes when in HDR scale mode? Well below half, right? You are never going to have anything above 1,000 nits ... so the top of the scopes scale is completely wasted space.
You only use really the bottom third of the scope ... and so you cannot see details in what you're doing. Hence using the 10 bit scale.
Now, at this time in Premiere, "graphics" is a bit of a problem. They can oft be 'gray' in HDR or even SDR timelines. If you have an issue with a graphic showing grayish rather than white for white letters ... select the graphic clip on the timeline, then in the CM Settings, set the override-to option to HLG, or maybe the Arri wide log.
Does that help explain my suggestions a bit?
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