HDR notification not displaying from 4K UHD HDR on YT

tam_c3df5332fc

Hey guys,

I have made a full length animation using Daz3d, followed by creating a UHD 4K dvd, but when I start the film, I am not receiving a notification from the TV of "HDR" as when I view any other UHD 4K dvd.

I used Final Cut Pro X and set the project to be Res 2020 - Wide Gamut HDR. Also, I shared using Apple ProRes 422. While the images still look stunningly beautiful, the desired effect of seeing the TV notify me that movie I am watching is "HDR"

So my questions are of the following:

1) Do I have to render each frame in .tiff format - as apposed to the .png format?

2) I used Motion 5 to "stitch" together the frames for each sequence and I used H.264 codec to share (export) because I am limited on hard drive space. Do I need to share each sequence in Apple ProRes 422, Apple ProRes 4444 XQ or Uncompressed 10-bit - the file size of each mov file increases dramatically with each of those choices

Or do neither of those things matter and I need to do something else?

I tried to attach a frame from one of the scenes, but it appears as though the site is not allowing me to upload

As usual, thanks in advance

BTW, I still have a day job (graveyard shift) and I have to get some sleep before my shift, so please forgive me for not replying quickly, but I will try to see if anyone replied before I go to work tonight.

Gordig

tam_c3df5332fc said:

1) Do I have to render each frame in .tiff format - as apposed to the .png format?

My suspicion is that you'd want to render every frame as .exr, but I'm not an expert.

tam_c3df5332fc

Thanks for replying @Gordig

I couldn't sleep, which I really should do, but I dug a little further.

First, I thought the same as you, but I do not have an .exr format to export from Daz3d.

Second, I found out that I have to convert the .mov file to an HEVC 10-bit file, which I can do with compressor. Unfortunately, I have read that this process takes a long time, so I cannot confirm for sure if it is indeed the answer and, since my movie is one hour 28 minutes 27 seconds and one frame long, this will probably be processing long after I have come back from my grave yard shift at work, followed by me having to make another 4K UHD dvd - so it will be a little while before I can confirm if this is the correct solution or not.

I searched for how to make a 4K UHD HDR file and, it turns out that YouTube creators who want their videos to be tagged as HDR, follow the aforementioned steps and seeing that the guy's video discribing the process on YT comes up as an HDR file, then I figure that it should work for me as well.

The batch has been going for a little bit and the progress bar does not even register the tiniest bit, but the clock is counting, so I know that it is doing something.

Anyways, I will chime in to let you guys know one way or the other if it worked - probably in a couple of days or so

Gordig

You can export .exr from DS by rendering a beauty canvas out using the Advanced tab in the Render Settings pane. This only works for Iray, as far as I know, so if you're using some other render engine, hopefully someone can chime in on that. 

tam_c3df5332fc

@Gordig

You can see by the screen shot that .exr is not available

BTW, my attempt to convert the file using compressor kept failing. I then turned to command line ffmpeg, but the mp4 file did not work. I am currently in the process of making an UHD dvd using a converted m4v file. I will let you guys know if this was successful or not within the next few hours

Richard Haseltine

The main render will always save in a non-HDR format, but canvasses will use .exr where needed - including for a beauty pass. Edit: this does work for image sequences too, they appear in a sub-folder of the seelcted output folder

Padone

@tam, it seems you didn't get it, as Gordig said you need to go to render settings > advanced, then setup a beauty canvas. The exr image will be saved on disc together with the png when you render, in a separate exr folder. As Richard said png, or any format in the save options, doesn't store HDR information, you need exr for that.

p.s. Then the iray tone mapping is not stored with exr images, so you will need to do tone mapping in final cut, to fit exr to the wide gamut output.

p.p.s. I'm still using 4.21, so may be 4.22 is a little different. I seem to recall that you have to unlock the advanced iray settings someway in the preferences, and that there's more color spaces for the output. May be Richard can help better with that.

tam_c3df5332fc

Thanks for the reply @Padone

And sorry for taking so long to reply, but I have been learning about camera LUT, wide gamut, rec 2020, etc..., along with still working the graveyard shift, which I should be sleeping right now, but I have to figure all of this out.

Thank you for the screenshot, now that I know what you, @Gordig and @Richard Haseltine are saying

Since I have already rendered all the scenes, is there a way to go back and just render the exr files? Also, from what I found so far - my old FCPX 10.4.10 does not support "exr" import

Richard Haseltine

tam_c3df5332fc said:

Thanks for the reply @Padone

And sorry for taking so long to reply, but I have been learning about camera LUT, wide gamut, rec 2020, etc..., along with still working the graveyard shift, which I should be sleeping right now, but I have to figure all of this out.

Thank you for the screenshot, now that I know what you, @Gordig and @Richard Haseltine are saying

Since I have already rendered all the scenes, is there a way to go back and just render the exr files? Also, from what I found so far - my old FCPX 10.4.10 does not support "exr" import

No, the extra data for the .exr is not kept so you have to rerender. Iray uses the higher bit-depth internally, but downsamples to 8 bits per channel for the basic render save and discards everything else once the render window is closed, so rendering the .exr would be the same as rerendering the whole scene.

tam_c3df5332fc

Thank you for that clarification @Richard Haseltine

I am definitely not re-rendering this entire movie (one hour twenty eight minutes twenty seven seconds and one frame) but I do want to learn for future references.

As a result, I created a simple scene with the "beauty" canvas and when I finished rendering, the program did create an exr file, along with the png file. Now when I open the exr file in Gimp, it is almost all white - I followed some instructions via the net to use levels and turn down the gamma, which showed the image, but most of the things that I found online where for compositing the exr file with the png file inside of After Effects.

Does anyone have any insight on how I can do this in Gimp - the compositing idea - the png file on it's own looks pretty good except for these white specs here and there, but I have a feeling that this is coming from the LAMH plugin in Daz3d - if anyone has a fix for that, then I would also appreciate the help

Once again, I tried to upload the image, but I received a notification of "No file data could be found in your post" As a result, I resized it in paint to twenty five percent and it uploaded

EDIT: update to the white spots - found the answer on a post in the forums - search for spots and there is the answer - remove the glossiness - still rendering, will post when done https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/14818/look-at-my-hair-lamh-official-thread-update-1-6-0-1-released/p63

tam_c3df5332fc

I think the png file looks pretty good and you are telling me that somehow I can composite the exr file to make it look even better?

Richard Haseltine

or just use the Beauty canvasses if you need the higher bit-depth images.

Padone

@tam I believe you're doing some confusion about "looking good" and "exr". That is, "exr" is not about "looking good", indeed you can have "exr" images that, once fitted to the output, look much worse than the default png. What makes the difference is "tone mapping", that is, how you fit the exr data into the output. A png will use the iray tone mapping, while with exr you will use the tone mapping by your external application, being it gimp or after fx or whatever. What a wide gamut output will allow you is to use more colors thus hopefully get a "looking good" image IF the tone mapping is good.

In gimp there's some default tone mapping for hdr images, or you can use advanced plugins.

https://docs.gimp.org/fr/gimp-colors-tone-mapping-menu.html

tam_c3df5332fc

@Padone

Thank you for telling me about the "tone mapping" in Gimp. I used the "Mantiuk" and it worked great, but that is only for one frame.

Do you know if there is such a thing for Adobe AE? BTW, I only have a real old version AE CS6

If not, then is there something similar for FCPX? I know that FCP 10.4.7 has HDR for tone mapping, but FCP 10.4.10 does not.
Also, from what I have seen, it does not allow to you to control the contrast and staturation. Plus, for this old mac, I do not have HDR monitors for FCPX to auto calibrate

Any help is appreciated and, as usual, thanks in advance

tam_c3df5332fc

Hey everyone,

Thanks to all of your suggestions, I was able to create my own "tone-mapper" in FCPX - add a color correction and set everything to zero, then add a Hue/Saturation and set the saturation to 0.8

See the attached screenshots, along with the original EXR which have nothing applied to them

https://youtu.be/M-tVtbg8-MM

Still trying to make YT recognize HDR-10 using mkvmerge on command line and according to MediaInfo this is an HDR-10 PQ file but YT keeps converting it to bt709

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I have tried ffmpeg as well and MediaInfo keeps telling me that I have an HDR-10 file

 

Padone

Sorry I don't know after effects, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't handle HDR. Anyway the blender compositor is free and of course does support HDR and tone mapping.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/4.0/compositing/types/color/adjust/tone_map.html

tam_c3df5332fc

Thanks @Padone, I will give it a try.

This last attempt was to use ffmpeg once again to make sure that it was an HDR-10:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx265 -preset fast -x265-params "crf=15:vbv-maxrate=50000:vbv-bufsize=250000:colorprim=bt2020:transfer=smpte2084:colormatrix=bt2020nc:master-display=G(13250,34500)B(7500,3000)R(34000,16000)WP(15635,16450)L(10000000,1):max-cll=475,385:ref=2" -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -c:a ac3 -color_trc smpte2084 output.mkv

BTW, that only works on my pc, but I receive a lot of errors on my old 2015 mac - even though, ffmpeg is the same version

Anyways, once I have done this, then MKVToolNix recognizes that it is a file that it can add info to the headers, which I follow the instructions on another forum, which they suggest the following settings, but in my opinion it made the file look TOO vibrant.

-s colour-matrix-coefficients=9 -s colour-range=1 -s colour-transfer-characteristics=16 -s colour-primaries=9 -s max-frame-light=300 -s max-luminance=1000.0 -s min-luminance=0.0001 -s chromaticity-coordinates=0.68,0.32,0.27,0.69,0.15,0.06 -s white-colour-coordinates=0.3127,0.3290

It finished with zero errors, but it YT still uploaded it and converted it to a BT.709, instead of a BT.2020

https://youtu.be/QbGMH77E4Yk

I will try Blender compositor, but I do not know if my issue is producing an mkv file that is HDR-10. My issue is that YT does not read it as a BT.2020, then it converts it to a BT.709, which makes all the work for nothing, because this was the goal, that I keep missing for some unknown reason