One week ago I visited BVE 2017, the UK’s largest Media Production event.
It’s 3 days of shows, expert led free seminars, free training sessions, a chance to network and chat with other professionals and also the opportunity to try or learn about the latest equipments and systems currently used across continents.
From what I noticed this year, the buzz word was HDR.
It was all about how to shoot it, manage it in post and deliver it to the broader audience.
I’ve only recently started grading HDR footage so it was a good opportunity for me to talk to top professional Peter Amies who has worked on films such as Star Wars ‘The Force Awakens” and “10 Cloverfield Lane” and who handles HDR footage on a daily basis.
As well as being an established VFX/Colourist Peter Amies is a training mentor at SGO.
Peter talked me through various stages of grading HDR with Mistika, a top colouring/VFX software mostly used in Hollywood. Mistika is an incredibly powerful software that can handle pretty much anything, it is also a very expensive one.
SGO proudly partnered with Canon, displaying pioneering advancements in HDR technology with this impressive state-of-the-art Mistika system holding the reins of an end-to-end HDR-4K colour-process workflow demonstrated on a Canon HDR monitor. It looked incredible.
Peter wrote parts of the Mistika programming to deal with the whole highlights and hight contrast issue that HDR footage encounters in the grading suite. Some careful and very clever mathematical algorithms to control the gamma, it is borderline genius and way above what my head can deal with!
It was all so very exciting and yet again so far removed from my day to day workflow!
Peter Amies talks about about grading HDR with Mistika
Bringing myself down to reality, I also visited the Blackmagic Design ‘magic bus’ and talked to Paul Young (Black Magic Technical Specialist - Post Production) about the various ways DaVinci Resolve 12.5 can handle HDR.
With the Gamma in mind, a whole new range of Gamma LUTs have been carefully crafted for broadcast post production houses to help deliver consistent HDR graded footage.
From what I could see, these LUTs would still allow you to grade your footage without loosing too much details in the highlights and or shadows and maintain a natural and 'realistic' look.
Something to look forward to in our future grading workflow.
HDR Luts in Davinci Resolve 12.5