Kategorie: Nerd stuff

Blender 3.0 lighting tests, converting a finished drone footage trailer from SDR to HDR in FCPX and filming with the new iPhone 13Pro in the ProRes format.

Blender 3.0 entered the beta phase, so I thought it is time to update the Blender and ACES 1.2 page. I found a Blender lighting tutorial video on YouTube from FlippedNormals.com and this animated me to follow along with the Blender 3.0beta version.

At the same time I was testing the latest version of the AMD RadeonProRender 3.3 for Blender as my 2020 iMac has a Radeon Pro graphics card.

I ended up rendering some stills of the sculpture head in Blender 3.0 with ACES 1.2. As the view transform I used sRGB.
The Radeon ProRender does not officially support Blender 3.0, so I used Blender 2.93.5 and Filmic to light the scenes.

The finished renders I imported into Resolve in ACES 1.3 mode and for the ODT I chose the HDR output ST-2084 1.000 (P3D65limited). My iMac does not show me a proper output on the UI viewer in Resolve, so I simply graded the stills to around 700 Nits peak brightness with the help of the scopes and checked the results on an iPadPro XDR.
For the SDR version, I switched to the ACES/sRGB output and started the color corrections from scratch.

And last but not least, the two render sequences using the OpenDRT (0.090b2 from Jed Smith) display rendering transform and some additional grading in FCPX.

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And here is another little test that I was able to for a personal project of Florian Zachau from Sehsucht that he shot on his SKYDIO 2 drone. He sent me his finished edited and graded project as a UHD ProRes file, I gave it a shot and converted it in FCPX to HDR.

The camera source files and his graded master are done in SDR, but the overall images have already such a big contrast, so it was easy to stretch the sun and lights even further out and make them brighter. I tried to hide the sun disc a little bit more and desaturated areas around the sun. A bit of grain was added and the converted ProRes file handed back to Florian.

Sure, there are compression and other artifacts from pushing the material even further, but on a mobile screen the image looks just cool! Thanks to Florian to be able to add a bit of “spice” to his cool trailer video.

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For the last little project I did a walk alongside the Elbe in Hamburg and filming close to dawn on a sunny autumn day in November.

The shots were filmed just from the hand holding the phone in HD 1080p@60fps in ProRes. The 20 GB heavy clips I imported into FCPX and created a little edit in a HDR/WideGamut. The source files are shot in HLG mode, and I tried in FCPX to to a conversion to PQ, but there is not much more that I could pull out of that footage. So I uploaded the slightly graded film from a ProRes HLG master file.

At the end of my holidays I like to share a list of links of pages and articles that I read, and some videos that I watched or re-watched to learn while relaxing in the south of Spain in my favorite city of Seville. Be aware, it is getting nerdy 🙂

• OCIO, Display Transforms and Misconceptions by Chris Brejon
• How Does Film ACTUALLY Work? (It’s MAGIC) [Photos and Development] – Smarter Every Day 258
• Photo Color Management history and rendering intents by Wayne Fox
• Camerimage 2018: Session One: Post-production for Cinematographers – From Camera to Display by Andy Minuth
• Camerimage 2018: Session Two: Natural Colours & Texture | A View on Colours & Texture in Painting by Daniele Siragusano and Rolf Coulange
• Explore HDR rendering with EDR (WWDC 2021) by Apple
• The Hitchhiker’s guide to Digital Color by Troy Sobotka
• Color Space Conversion and rendering intents by cambridgeincolour.com
• ACESCentral.com discussion forums

Sometimes it might be helpful to eliminate color when I try to get a better understanding of it. That’s why I revisited an older HDR clip and created a black&white version of it.

Why can’t I see a proper HDR preview on an iMac2020/MBP2018 UI screen? In FCPX this is possible.

For some time now I am testing with HDR content in FCPX and Resolve Studio. FCPX works best for me with Alexa LogC material in HDR/WideGamut projects. In Resolve I set the project to ACES 1.1 and use the ST-2084 (1.000Nits P3D65limited) ODT for the tests.

Seeing HDR content in FCPX and review the exported ProRes444 files works the same convenient as with SDR footage. What you see inside FCPX is the same as in the Quicktime player.

In Resolve Studio (both V16&V17beta) this is a different story. I can also get a HDR preview in the Resolve UI, but it is vastly to bright. I can’ judge anything here. The exported result as a ProRes 444 however looks very similar to the FCPX output. I am aware that I am comparing two different color management systems and different HDR tone mapping curves.

The following screenshots don’t help much, as they can’t show the HDR values, but the most noticeable difference can be spotted on the grey background of the CG car render, and the overall overblown car paint appearance.

I posted in the Blackmagicdesign forum with no success. I am not sure if this is a bug or I am just missing a button somewhere. I would expect the HDR preview to work very similar in FCPX & Resolve.

Here are some Quicklinks to the articles that are most important to me at the moment. Everything else you can find here by scrolling down or checking the menu in the upper right corner: Panicpost – commercial break

• HDR.toodee.de – a little subdomain which features only HDR content – updated in January 2021
• SDR next to HDR – my latest article related to HDR, where I try to explain the advantages of HDR content from a perspective of media professionals who did not see their content in HDR (yet), but might like it. – from January 2021
• Checking the Colorchecker – a closer look at Colorcheckers.
  – from January 2021