HDR-SDR Conversion: Live HDR Single Master Production Conversion Interoperability Challenges
Originally Aired - Tuesday, April 16 | 10:00 AM - 10:20 AM PT
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Live production workflows, particularly those for sports, employ complex pipelines to deliver HD, UHD, SDR, and HDR video streams. Because content originates as HDR or SDR, effective and flexible conversions are required between formats. Today, diverse tone mapping and inverse tone mapping technologies are proposed to the industry, each with the promise to create premium HDR content while maintaining the quality of SDR versions. Look Up Tables (LUTs) are the chief conversion technique used today, which constrain the capabilities of HDR and/or compromise the SDR look. Based on fixed reference levels, their static nature exposes content to artifacts emerging from changing conditions during live capture (e.g., sunset, passing clouds, shadows), leading sometimes to a growing set of LUTs to adapt to each of the conditions. On the other hand, based on dynamic reference levels, dynamic techniques accommodate such changes. However, a problem emerging is that neither the different LUT solutions nor dynamic solutions are fully interoperable: each produces content with different properties, either different reference levels or different video signal levels, requiring different conversions to satisfy the critical requirement of seamlessly delivering final content. As the HDR technology becomes popular and more and more used in the industry, this interoperability issue is getting increasingly problematic, given the growing number of static and dynamic solutions. Indeed, when producing the final content, how does one ensure that the correct static LUT is used or that the dynamic solution is correctly set? Discussions have started in many organizations to address the problem. Experiments and demonstrations have been organized by the end of 2023 showcasing the industry appeal and concerns. This paper discusses the challenge and evaluation consensus. A generic solution is proposed, based on metadata, that intends to resolve this compatibility issue. By characterizing the produced HDR content with those new proposed metadata, we present how static and dynamic solutions can be interoperable, paving the way for industry to better control the content production while leveraging the full expansion capabilities of HDR, as well as a smooth transition from static to dynamic techniques ensuring delivery of premium HDR and SDR content.
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