HDR & WCG For Broadcast - The Book

‘HDR & WCG For Broadcast – The Book’ is a multi-article exploration of the science and practical applications of all aspects of High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut within broadcast production.

The original 2019 Broadcast Bridge ‘HDR’ series has been one of our most enduringly popular editorial collections - it's been read by over 50,000 people. This new book takes this essential topic area and revitalizes it with a complete re-write by the original series author Phil Rhodes. In the intervening years HDR has become a consumer expectation and the range of devices consumers use to access content has proliferated enormously. Most broadcasters and streamers around the world now deliver both SDR and HDR versions of much of their content giving the consumer the ultimate choice of received format. This brings with it a significant set of challenges for broadcasters, especially with live production. How to capture, produce and deliver SDR and HDR simultaneously.

This new book re-visits all the key principles of colorimetry, and the various technical formats and standards involved in acquisition, production and delivery. It then examines the various methodologies and workflows employed by the broadcast community to achieve seamless simultaneous production & delivery. 


The free PDF download contains all 10 articles in this series - and all the articles are available as individual web pages:

Article 1 : Picture Fundamentals: Brightness
How humans perceive light and how this relates to the technology we use to capture and display images.

Article 2 : Picture Fundamentals: Color
How humans perceive color & the compromises involved in representing color, using display technology.

Article 3 : Expanding Acquisition Capabilities
HDR & WCG do present new requirements for vision engineers, but the fundamental principles remain familiar & easily manageable.

Article 4 : Expanding Display Capabilities
Broadcast image production is intrinsically linked to consumer displays and their capacity to reproduce High Dynamic Range and a Wide Color Gamut.

Article 5 : Equipment Fundamentals: Camera Technology
Understanding the terminology and technical theory of camera sensors & lenses is a key element of specifying systems to meet the consumer desire for High Dynamic Range.

Article 6 : HDR: A Bigger Stage To Act On
Our partner Atomos discuss how from a creative perspective HDR is all about enabling technology that offers a far broader, deeper palette of light, detail and color to work with.

Article 7 : Demands On Production With HDR & WCG
The adoption of HDR requires adjustments in workflow that place different requirements on both people and technology, especially when multiple formats are required simultaneously.

Article 8 : The Creative Challenges Of HDR-SDR Simulcast
HDR can make choices easier - or harder - at every stage of production but the biggest challenge may be just how subjective those choices are.

Article 9 : Automating HDR-SDR Conversion
Automation seems like an obvious solution but effective conversion involves understanding what the image content is and therefore what the priorities are for how it should look.

Article 10 : Disruptive Future Technologies
Ensuring consistency of lighting between the virtual world and physical objects on set requires controlling production lighting based on image content

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