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However, because it’s an evolving technology, the technical standards that have been developed far exceed what current consumer televisions, projectors, phones, and tablets 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 Isn’t Just for Televisions
Lest you think that living room televisions and projectors are the only way to watch HDR content, certain flagship iOS and Android phones and tablets have implemented HDR viewing capabilities 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 Ways of Mastering 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.
A graded HDR image being output looks similar to a log-encoded image
At the time of this writing, there are five principal approaches to mastering HDR that DaVinci Resolve is capable of supporting, including:
— Dolby Vision®
— HDR10
— HDR10+
— HDR Vivid
— Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG)