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 Pig 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 HD R 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
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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 inite 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 good 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 ey holes by the
way if your eyeholes 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 a 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 soft Ware
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 own in the next probably 5 to 10
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 hdr1 hdr10 plus DOL
be 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 $30,000 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 codec 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
back 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 l 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 siiz fits-all L 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 autogenerated
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 LTT Store.com now you can upload your own L
file alongside the video with customized values but the process by which you go
about applying the L 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 around with the command prompt in order
to apply the custom Lu 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 6 years ago nowadays though
software like Premier 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 metad data like supposedly YouTube supports hdr10
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 HDR 10 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 L
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 filmmaker ERS 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 in 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% 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 few were 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
an 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
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you want to learn more about the inner workings of HDR check out our video HDR
standards explained hdr10 dby 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
content creator yourself we'd love to hear about any problems you've experienced down in the comments