User Manual

Table Of Contents
High Dynamic Range (HDR)
Grading in DaVinci Resolve
The HDR features found in DaVinci Resolve are only available in DaVinci Resolve Studio.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) video describes an emerging family of video encoding and
distribution technologies designed to enable a new generation of television displays to play
video capable of intensely bright highlights and increased saturation. The general idea is that
the majority of an HDR image will be graded similarly to how a Standard Dynamic Range (SDR)
image is graded now, with the shadows, midtones, and low highlights being mostly the same
between traditionally SDR and HDR-graded images, to maintain a comfortable viewing
experience and easier backward compatibility. However, HDR provides abundant additional
headroom for very bright highlights and color saturation that far exceed what has been visible in
SDR television and cinema, without clipping, that enable the colorist to create more vivid and
life-like highlights in images such as sunsets, lit clouds, firelight, explosions, sparkles, and other
intensely bright and colorful imagery. This not only provides more life-like lighting intensity and
saturation, but it also dramatically expands the contrast available in the scene. For example, an
SDR display should have a peak luminance level of 100 nits (cd/m2), but existing HDR displays
can provide peak luminance levels of 700, 1000, or even 4000 nits.
However, because it’s an emerging technology, the technical standards being proposed far
exceed what the first few generations of consumer displays are capable of. At the time of this
writing, consumer televisions are capable of outputting 700 to 1600 nits. Furthermore,
consumer displays are often saddled with automatic brightness limiting (ABL) circuits that limit
power consumption to acceptable levels for home use, which means that only a certain
percentage of the picture may reach these peak values at any one time. This is fine, because
the point of HDR is not that you’re making the entire image brighter, it’s that you have more
headroom for specific bright highlights and additional saturation.
For all of these reasons, HDR standards focus on describing what displays should be capable
of, not how these levels are to be used. That is a creative decision.
HDR Isnt Just for Televisions
Lest you think that living room televisions are the only way to watch HDR content, Android and
iOS phones and tablets have both implemented HDR viewing capabilities on their flagship
phones capable of HDR display. Phones such as the Galaxy Note8 and Note9. and the Apple
iPhone X, XS, and XS Max, have OLED displays that are capable of meeting or even exceeding
the UltraHD requirements for HDR content on an OLED display. This makes HDR, surprisingly, a
widely available mobile experience.
The Different Formats of HDR
While different HDR technologiesuse different methods to map the video levels of your
program to an HDR display’s capabilities, they all output a “near-logarithmically” encoded signal
that requires a compatible television that’s capable of correctly stretchingthis signal into its
“normalized” form for viewing. This means if you look at an HDR signal that’s output from
thevideo interface of your grading workstation on an SDR display, it will look flat, desaturated,
and unappealing until it’s plugged into your HDR display of choice.
Chapter – 8 HDR Setup andGrading 238