Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This was all a waste of money. – Why HDR Sucks on YouTube.”.
Cameras lights, fancy calibrated monitors. What is the point of any of this youtube has supported 4k high dynamic range or hdr video for years, and yet this so-called next big thing is conspicuously absent from the content of even the geekiest creators. No offense, sorry, nothing personal! I know you know it’s true and i know this question has been eating away at you. Why i mean many of you are carrying an hdr display around in your pocket. Surely you’d like to use it, so is it laziness? Incompetence both? I don’t know because the problem actually isn’t on the creator side, it’s with youtube.
The truth is that getting that little hdr selector to show up that’s the easy part, delivering a consistent viewing experience. Well, that’s extremely hard right now because of platform limitations that have existed for years now – and i say enough is enough: it’s time for youtube to stop half-baking features that actually elevate the viewing experience and take these problems seriously. You know what else we take seriously segways to our sponsors. I fix it need a diverse toolkit.
Ifixit has just the right thing for you learn more about the manta toolkit and its 112 steel bits with two premium. Drivers at the end of the video hdr hasn’t proven to be the kind of tech buzzword that really drives people to upgrade, but when they finally experience it done well, most do agree that it looks more lifelike and immersive. This is thanks to both its wider color gamut and its ability to retain detail in both the brightest and the darkest portions of the scene. Now hdr recording is all around us with popular devices boasting the capability for years now, but in spite of this, most videos on youtube are uploaded in standard dynamic range or sdr, which has a much narrower range of colors to sample from and tends to look flat Or more lifeless by comparison, obvious fix, then right, let’s all just upload our videos in hdr, so they’ll be more gooder.
Well yeah. We thought of that. Obviously, but every time we revisit this conversation internally, we run into youtube platform problems that have made our efforts, discouraging, to say the least, to fully understand them, though, we’re going to need to dive into how hdr content gets from the sets of your favorite shows to Your eye holes by the way, if your eye holes, are starved for some more entertainment check out our floatplane exclusive video on the biggest data hoarders at lmg. You won’t want to miss it. First of all, not all content benefits from hdr, so lighting wardrobe and set design play a major part in the overall experience. Then there’s your camera anything from your iphone to a cinema. Camera costing tens of thousands of dollars can capture hdr video, but not all, is created equal to explain. We need to actually define the dynamic range part of high dynamic range for a camera sensor.
The dynamic range is the number of increments, or stops that it’s rated for each stop up is double the amount of light, and vice versa. In a nutshell, then, the more stops the sensor can see at a time the higher the dynamic range and top-tier cinema cameras can do 14 or more before they start to lose details in the darkest or the brightest parts of the scene. When it comes to the content that we consume, however, hdr also comes with the expectation of a wider color gamut and well-mastered. Hdr content should take advantage of both of these elements not to end up with an even worse version of the vivid mode in a best buy showroom, but to get a more natural appearance to achieve this, a colorist will use specialized software and an ungodly, expensive hdr. Mastering display to fine-tune details in a video like the texture of plants, the lines on a person’s face or the different shades of blue in the sky, making them appear more true to life, but we’ve got a problem. The professional grade display that that colorist is working on is undoubtedly much nicer than anything you’ll learn in the next, probably five to ten years. So how do we translate what they’re working on to your experience at home? Well, that’s where all of these competing hdr formats come in whether you’re talking about hdr, 10, hdr, 10, plus dolby vision, hlg or any of the others.
All of them exist to solve the same fundamental challenge of somehow delivering a consistent viewing experience across displays that have vastly different capabilities. Thankfully, we do have a solution tone. Mapping metadata metadata is best defined as data that accompanies other data providing helpful information about it.
And, oh, you also want to know about tone mapping. Ah, now that is a way of mathematically scaling, the brightness and the color values of the content to match your current display. It’S super cool and without it this shot from the hdr channel looking toward the sun would turn into a massive stain of white light on anything, but a thirty thousand dollar reference monitor so then back to youtube. The sdr content on the platform is also accompanied by all sorts of metadata. This includes information about the video and audio codecs, the creation date, etc. What it doesn’t include is any brightness or color information. Sdr devices expect this metadata to be encoded directly into the video file. Well, that would be a big problem if they clicked on an hdr upload, where the metadata is stored separately from the video file, while hdr video can be played backed by an sdr device. It’S going to end up looking a little something like this and given that the majority of viewers on youtube are still likely watching on an sdr device. That would be an unacceptable compromise, but don’t worry they do have a better one.
It’S called a lut or a lookup table. Luts are essentially data files that are applied onto videos that transform the existing color values with their own color grade. For you, zoomers out there, you could think of them kind of like instagram filters, they’re, not quite the same as tone mapping which translates the entire color space, but youtube’s one size fits all. Lut application looks all right enough that joe average, with his tn, monitor, isn’t going to complain when they’re watching your hdr video in its auto-generated sdr.
However, because it’s not tailored to your exact video, i can pretty much guarantee that the colors are not going to come out. The way that you intended yielding dull lifeless results and it’s bad enough that the hdr channel actually includes a disclaimer in their video descriptions. Warning that if their video looks pretty crap, it’s probably because youtube ruined it. You know what doesn’t look.
Crappy are ltt beanie in seven gorgeous colors available at ltdstore.com. Now you can upload your own lut file alongside the video with customized values, but the process by which you go about applying the lut is convoluted at best involving stumbling across google’s help page on uploading, hdr videos, which then directs you to a github page, where you Download a tool and fiddle around with the command prompt in order to apply the custom lut to your video. Even then, the tool itself is antiquated, as it was originally intended just to flag a video as hdr, so that youtube would know what you were uploading since flagging content for hdr metadata wasn’t easy six years ago. Nowadays, though, software like premiere pro, can export a video with the requisite hdr metadata that youtube needs to identify the video as hdr.
It’S just that youtube isn’t using all of the provided metadata like supposedly youtube supports, hdr 10 plus, which is great because it’s an open standard for dynamic metadata, which provides enough info for tone mapping on a scene-by-scene basis, rather than just applying one tone map for the Entire video, but neither we nor the gentleman who runs the hdr channel, have been able to get the hdr10 plus to work, so we’ve all given up on that. The tool does, however, still give you an attempt at an sdr conversion by embedding your own lut like separate from youtube’s standard one, but this is with dynamic metadata limitations and the loss of detail for bright areas in a bright scene. For example, another solution could be letting you upload both an sdr and an hdr grade of your video, something that prime video, by contrast, does give you the option of doing, but i can’t exactly easily migrate, my business to prime, since, in addition to obvious reasons, it’s Geared toward professional filmmakers and distributors, and before you even begin to upload anything, you’ve got to jump through hoops like adding your bank account tax info. And if you read deep enough from the fine print, probably a pledge to donate a kidney in the event, daddy bezos needs it. All of which means that i need youtube to care enough to make this process manageable, for independent creators and and to know that they should care. We know from our audience data that about half of our viewers are on mobile, with roughly half of those running android. 10 or newer, which, by our rough napkin calculations, means that at least a third of you right now are on an hdr capable screen at least on your phone. Even then, there are some hiccups, though, on android there’s, still no user brightness control alongside hdr, so hdr videos will just blast your eyes with maximum brightness, not that great at night and according to the most recent steam hardware survey, over 80 percent of you are running At 1080p, or less on your computers, which are almost certainly not hdr and of the remaining 20 very few, will have shelled out for an hdr capable model, with fewer still spending the thousand plus on a quality hdr display.
That will truly give you a better viewing experience, but the question there is: why would you shell out the extra it’s not like your favorite content? Creators are uploading in hdr or anything. So i guess that’s the point of this video. I just wanted you to know that it’s not because i don’t want to, and i wanted to finally get this out of my system because it might sound harsh, but youtube has been kind of like a disappointing child for me lately i can’t control it all. I can do is sit it down and talk about how deep down it knows it’s capable of living up to its untapped potential, but only if it applies itself. You know so. Hopefully this rant reaches someone over there.
Who cares enough to make a change? Oh, and i hope it also reaches our sponsor, i fix it father’s day is quickly approaching, which i love and i fix it – has gifts for dads at all price points. If you’re looking for the ultimate gift check out ifixit’s manta kit, it comes complete with 112 steel bits, with everything from standard bits like phillips and flathead to more niche bits like torques, tri-point and game bits as well. Ifixit manta kit includes not one but two aluminum screwdriver handles with a hefty quarter-inch drive for full-size applications and a smaller four millimeter one for precision work. Both drivers feature magnetic bit, sockets knurled grips and silky smooth spinning tops you can just nestle them in your palm plus the tool.
Kit’S lid doubles as a sorting tray for added convenience and that’s magnetic too work confidently. Knowing all ifixit tools are backed by a lifetime. Warranty and check out ifixit’s gifts for dads using the link below. If you guys enjoyed this video, and you want to learn more about the inner workings of hdr check out. Our video hdr standards explained hdr 10 dolby vision, hlg over on techwiki and be sure to let us know what you think about youtube’s implementation of hdr and, if you’re, a content. Creator yourself, we’d love to hear about any problems. You’Ve experienced down in the comments. .