Essential Guide: Live HDR Down-Conversion

September 9th 2019 - 01:50 PM
Tony Orme, Editor at The Broadcast Bridge

Live sports productions are the natural home for HDR. The increase in luminance latitude combined with extended color space delivers an immersive experience never before witnessed by the home viewer. But backwards compatibility must still be maintained for legacy SDR audiences.

In this Essential Guide we delve deep into the HDR to SDR down-conversion process to understand the optimal strategies for simultaneously delivering HDR and SDR transmissions. For example, should we expose for HDR or SDR? And why does it matter?

HDR down-conversion may at first seem like an easy task. But the complex interactions of contrast, color, and the human visual system (HVS) soon expose the intricacies of deriving SDR from HDR. To avoid dual workflows and spiraling costs, automation is key to delivering simultaneous real-time HDR and SDR workflows.

This Essential Guide digs deep into tone mapping operators (TMOs) to understand how they work and the different parameters needed to satisfy the contrast dependent HVS. S-Curves, logarithmic transfer functions and bit conversion are all explored to gain a better understanding of the real-time HDR to SDR down-conversion.

Sponsors Lynx Technik provide an in depth discussion of how to overcome the practical challenges of real-time HDR to SDR down-conversion. Collaborating with the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Lynx Technik demonstrate how their real-time adaptive algorithms, based on research from the university, provide outstanding HDR to SDR down-conversions.

Download this Essential Guide now to understand the challenges of real-time HDR-SDR conversion. Understand the complexities of the HVS interaction with HDR down-conversion. And master the TMO and its applications in real-time live sports productions.

This Essential Guide is a must for anybody looking to build and install HDR and SDR workflows. It’s essential for broadcast engineers and creatives alike. Download this Essential Guide now.

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