The views in this discussion about upgrading / manufacturer responsibility for updates are interesting. Would you expect a new car to be updated after a year or two when a more economical engine is available or a new technology is developed by the car manufacturer?
@Steve Withers - great article. Forgive my naive question but is there any implication for camera equipment to be able to record content for HDR/HLG or are the cameras already way ahead of the resolution and dynamic range that is actually broadcast - i.e. if the broadcast element is resolved then all major channels could start transmitting HLG?
The common motion pictures cameras are more than sufficient in terms of dynamic range.
Even nominally exposed negative film from decades ago is more than sufficient.
There is a bit of a white elephant in the room with HDR.
Most nominally exposed scenes in a naturally lit location contain about 9 stops of useful information from shadows to usuallybeyond the point where extra highlight information becomes detectable to a human being.
Negative film captures about 10.5 stops max.
The common digital motion picture cameras capture a "claimed" 14stops. And at least one of them tops out about 12stops in reality.
I have NEVER seen an image that contained more than 9.5stops and most rarely get higher than 9. Whether its artificially lit , naturally lit... whatever.
If you were to view the full range of a captured 9stop image whilst maintaining the stop relationship back to luminance , it will look flat and washed out.
To make it pleasing you need to bend around the contrast. Compress and even softclip the whites and shadows to get a nice visually pleasing range. You actually have to throw away dynamic range to make the image pleasing to the eye.
This is regardless of the dynamic range the display is capable off.
Most imagery regardless of its inherent dynamic range benifits from being displayed with as much dynamic range as possible assuming its been mapped properly ( again this mapping is also part of grading , its effectively the same thing or ends up having the same impact as "rendering intent".
By the time its graded to look pleasing its essentially no more than about 7 stops of representational range.
So the issue with HDR isn't how much range the camera shoots . Its not even really the range left in your graded image as long as it looks visually the way it should according to the creators.