- 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 big 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 HDR 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.
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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 spite 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 at HDR.
So there'll be more good-er.
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 gonna need to dive
into how HDR content gets
from the sets of your favorite shows
to your eye holes.
By the way,
if your eye holes are starved for some more entertainment
check out our Floatplane exclusive video
on the biggest data hoarders at LMG.
You won't wanna 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 software
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 five 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 HDR 10, HDR 10 plus,
Dolby 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 wanna 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 codex, the creation date, et cetera.
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 gonna 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 LUT
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 size fits all LUD application
looks all right enough that Joe average
with his TN monitor, isn't gonna complain when
they're watching your HDR video
in its auto-generated 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, it doesn't look crappy?
Our LTT beanie
in seven gorgeous colors available@lttstore.com.
Now you can upload your own LUT file
alongside the video with customized values,
but the process
by which you go about applying the LUT
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 with the command prompt
in order to apply the custom LUT 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 six years ago.
Nowadays though software
like Premiere 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 metadata.
Like supposedly,
YouTube supports HDR 10 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 LUT
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 filmmakers and distributors.
And before you even begin to upload anything
you've gotta 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.
(Bezos graphic laughs evilly)
All of which means that,
I need YouTube to care enough
to make this process manageable for independent creators.
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 ten 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 fewer 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
in 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
outta 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.
So hopefully this rant reaches someone
over there who cares enough to make a change.
Oh, and I hope it also reaches our sponsor.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video
and you wanna learn more about the
inner workings of HDR,
check out our video,
HDR standards explained,
HDR 10, Dolby vision, HLG over
on tech Wiki.
And be sure to let us know what you think
about YouTube's implementation of HDR.
And if you're a content creator yourself,
we'd love to hear about any problems you've experienced
down in the comments.