Displaying native HLG (HDR) M2P files on 8K OLED, astonishing!

[christangey]

I have been wanting to try and play the native M2P HLG files on a big display for a long time and today I went into our local Harvey Norman store (Australian retailer) and did that with the Manager and a senior salesman.


We plugged the below videos into an LG 77" OLED 8K display via a USB3 port on the side. The pictures were simply astonishing, both with the native files and the version I had color-graded in H265 via the FCPX timeline, mastering out via Apple prores 422HQ and then re-encoding via Handbrake at 10 bit H265/mp4 at a 40,000 kbps bit rate. The sales people literally have 40 X big screen TVs going all day long with the manufacturers "super-images" going on a loop, and I've been a Cinematographer for 25 years, but we all literally stood there breathless. Nothing to do with my particular images but just the sheer quality and color depth in front of us. I noticed later that my USB stick had an LG Folder appear on it with software so it obviously downloads to it to make it work? Another thing was when we played an HLG file, an HLG logo would come up briefly in the corner.


So if anyone says the Mavic 2 Pro isn't capable of world class images maybe it's not the drone but their delivery system at the other end!

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[brett8883]

I have been wanting to try and play the native M2P HLG files on a big display for a long time and today I went into our local Harvey Norman store (Australian retailer) and did that with the Manager and a senior salesman.


We plugged the below videos into an LG 77" OLED 8K display via a USB3 port on the side. The pictures were simply astonishing, both with the native files and the version I had color-graded in H265 via the FCPX timeline, mastering out via Apple prores 422HQ and then re-encoding via Handbrake at 10 bit H265/mp4 at a 40,000 kbps bit rate. The sales people literally have 40 X big screen TVs going all day long with the manufacturers "super-images" going on a loop, and I've been a Cinematographer for 25 years, but we all literally stood there breathless. Nothing to do with my particular images but just the sheer quality and color depth in front of us. I noticed later that my USB stick had an LG Folder appear on it with software so it obviously downloads to it to make it work? Another thing was when we played an HLG file, an HLG logo would come up briefly in the corner.


So if anyone says the Mavic 2 Pro isn't capable of world class images maybe it's not the drone but their delivery system at the other end!

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Phenomenal as always Chris. I’m sold. I know you are busy but can you speak at all about your color grading workflow in FCPX? I’m currently in this rut of never being totally happy with what I have and as a photographer well versed in the dark arts of still image editing I feel surprisingly amateurish color grading video. Are you a less is more kinda guy or are you one of those wizards who can look at only a vector-scope and tell what the footage is of without even seeing it?

 

[christangey]

Phenomenal as always Chris. I’m sold. I know you are busy but can you speak at all about your color grading workflow in FCPX? I’m currently in this rut of never being totally happy with what I have and as a photographer well versed in the dark arts of still image editing I feel surprisingly amateurish color grading video. Are you a less is more kinda guy or are you one of those wizards who can look at only a vector-scope and tell what the footage is of without even seeing it?

Oh boy Brett, they are difficult questions and let me say that I think we work in "light" arts, not dark ones! For normal color grading I go by feelings and only towards the end use the scope, usually to achieve my old-fashioned obsession in making sure each clip is "broadcast safe". HLG is another thing altogether and HLG with FCPX is another thing again! Not even going to start trying to explain how hard Rec2020 is without an HDR monitor (way out of my league) but lets presume we are editing native HLG files on a FCPX Rec709 timeline, as I have done above. I cannot talk about what happens to HLG on any other editing systems but even properly exposed files on the FCPX timeline appear horribly blown out, losing all detail in the highlights. This is scary first time you see it!

Luckily, this is no big deal. Start by bringing your highlights down until it looks good, a great guide for this is blue sky. If it is still overexposed with an HLG file it will have a cyan banding in the sky, pull highlights down until the cyan itself comes down and is replaced by blue. Then it is all subtle, maybe pull your blacks down a tad, and your midtones and saturation up a touch. When you're happy you can't really keep it as HLG but you CAN still export it as 10 bit color which looks just as good to me. So do that via Apple Prores 422HQ as a .mov and then to play it on a TV, online or on a computer you can use a great little desktop app called Handbrake to convert it to an mp4. Make sure you specify H265 10bit in the dropdown under "video" . Note that vimeo and yout tube now support H265 (HVEC) but only newer computers and TVs do.

 

[brett8883]

Oh boy Brett, they are difficult questions and let me say that I think we work in "light" arts, not dark ones! For normal color grading I go by feelings and only towards the end use the scope, usually to achieve my old-fashioned obsession in making sure each clip is "broadcast safe". HLG is another thing altogether and HLG with FCPX is another thing again! Not even going to start trying to explain how hard Rec2020 is without an HDR monitor (way out of my league) but lets presume we are editing native HLG files on a FCPX Rec709 timeline, as I have done above. I cannot talk about what happens to HLG on any other editing systems but even properly exposed files on the FCPX timeline appear horribly blown out, losing all detail in the highlights. This is scary first time you see it!

Luckily, this is no big deal. Start by bringing your highlights down until it looks good, a great guide for this is blue sky. If it is still overexposed with an HLG file it will have a cyan banding in the sky, pull highlights down until the cyan itself comes down and is replaced by blue. Then it is all subtle, maybe pull your blacks down a tad, and your midtones and saturation up a touch. When you're happy you can't really keep it as HLG but you CAN still export it as 10 bit color which looks just as good to me. So do that via Apple Prores 422HQ as a .mov and then to play it on a TV, online or on a computer you can use a great little desktop app called Handbrake to convert it to an mp4. Make sure you specify H265 10bit in the dropdown under "video" . Note that vimeo and yout tube now support H265 (HVEC) but only newer computers and TVs do.

Thanks! You are right, most certainly an art of light!

Boy I think you could make a killing if you were to able to make a “Chris Tangey Collection” of Mavic 2 Pro HLG LUTs for us average Joes out here. To my knowledge this hasn’t been done yet by anyone specifically for Mavic 2 Pro HLG.

 

[mavicdriver]

Chris, I just stumbled across your post here and I want to thank you for posting your videos. This is such great stuff and you are obviously a quite talented guy. It is so cool to see someone really getting the most you can get out of the M2P and its video potential. I love my M2P and I am always mad at myself for butchering videos. Your examples and advice are inspiring to me, and just maybe I will get myself in gear and learn some of what you are showing us rank amateurs. Keep up the great work and keep posting.

 

[christangey]

Chris, I just stumbled across your post here and I want to thank you for posting your videos. This is such great stuff and you are obviously a quite talented guy. It is so cool to see someone really getting the most you can get out of the M2P and its video potential. I love my M2P and I am always mad at myself for butchering videos. Your examples and advice are inspiring to me, and just maybe I will get myself in gear and learn some of what you are showing us rank amateurs. Keep up the great work and keep posting.

We're all rank amateurs at heart I think! It's really just a matter of trying harder each time, even if it's a little bit, it's all incremental. As I say I am astounded by the pictures when you see them on an 8K OLED, now sure, the 8K may be "up-resing" the 4K vision somehow but it shows that in HLG format the bit rate, the color space and really, surprisingly, the lens are all inherently "there" in the M2 Pro and it doesn't need external help just somewhere to actually appreciate it. I'm convinced now that 8K will never be a broadcast standard as I don't think the human eye can really detect the difference between that and 4K, certainly on screens up to 200" anyway!

 

[christangey]

Thanks! You are right, most certainly an art of light!

Boy I think you could make a killing if you were to able to make a “Chris Tangey Collection” of Mavic 2 Pro HLG LUTs for us average Joes out here. To my knowledge this hasn’t been done yet by anyone specifically for Mavic 2 Pro HLG.

Thanks Brett will give it a thought

 

[kilomikebravo]

..maybe it's not the drone but their delivery system at the other end!

Chris: I thought that first clip of yours was the best I'd ever seen for M2P footage but this second one even tops that! The first word that came to mind was, "WOW!" Yes, I'd say that you have your M2P "dialed in" perfectly and your camera skills are FAR better than my own. My favorite part was when the two flocks of birds flew by over the dunes, that was really spectacular. WELL DONE! (and lucky catch, too)

I have never seen an 8k display. My 75" 4k Sony upsamples 1080p programming to 4k beautifully and I'm wondering how well the Samsung does? Obviously, an 8k display device was over the top. But I too have watched my M2P clips on two different 4k televisions and the imagery is stunning. That's why I upgraded my two computer displays to 4k and now, I can appreciate clips like yours without having to go to the televisions to watch over the network. It makes for much better color grading as well. Recommended.

As a tiny aside, I would suggest that you reduce the drop shadow on your watermark quite a bit as the current setting makes it difficult to read. I would go for the same shadow as you used on the title text and just reduce the opacity of that layer.

But again...SUPERB CLIP!

 

[christangey]

Chris: I thought that first clip of yours was the best I'd ever seen for M2P footage but this second one even tops that! The first word that came to mind was, "WOW!" Yes, I'd say that you have your M2P "dialed in" perfectly and your camera skills are FAR better than my own. My favorite part was when the two flocks of birds flew by over the dunes, that was really spectacular. WELL DONE! (and lucky catch, too)

I have never seen an 8k display. My 75" 4k Sony upsamples 1080p programming to 4k beautifully and I'm wondering how well the Samsung does? Obviously, an 8k display device was over the top. But I too have watched my M2P clips on two different 4k televisions and the imagery is stunning. That's why I upgraded my two computer displays to 4k and now, I can appreciate clips like yours without having to go to the televisions to watch over the network. It makes for much better color grading as well. Recommended.

As a tiny aside, I would suggest that you reduce the drop shadow on your watermark quite a bit as the current setting makes it difficult to read. I would go for the same shadow as you used on the title text and just reduce the opacity of that layer.

But again...SUPERB CLIP!

Thanks very much Kilo, it was actually an LG display and it seems to do the 4K /8K extremely well. Thanks for the tip on the watermark, I'll have a look, sometimes you can't see the woods for the trees with these things!

 

[kilomikebravo]

Ah...must have had Samsing on my mind. I too have an LG OLED, but 4k and clips look great of course but they look just as good on my computer displays now.

..sometimes you can't see the woods for the trees with these things!

AMEN to that, amigo and I swear, that's the story of my life. <laughing>

 

[FormerMember07122019_2]

Hi Chris and KMB,

I have a 4K LG OLED TV and agree the M2P 4K footage looks fantastic. I just wanted to mention, if you were not aware, that there is an free LG app that allows you to display footage from an tablet directly to the LG TV through WiFi. It pretty handy if you want to quickly show family or friends one of your “masterpieces”. I use an iPad but I suspect there is an Android apps as well. This obviously assumes that you have connected the TV to the WiFi network.

Ken

@christangey
@kilomikebravo

 

[kilomikebravo]

Ken: Personally, I've never used an iPad or any other tablet for editing stills or videos. As for the LG app, thanks for the tip, I'll check into it. I just keep a WD MyCloud drive on the network and play all my clips from there from any of the televisions.

 

[christangey]

Hi Chris and KMB,

I have a 4K LG OLED TV and agree the M2P 4K footage looks fantastic. I just wanted to mention, if you were not aware, that there is an free LG app that allows you to display footage from an tablet directly to the LG TV through WiFi. It pretty handy if you want to quickly show family or friends one of your “masterpieces”. I use an iPad but I suspect there is an Android apps as well. This obviously assumes that you have connected the TV to the WiFi network.

Ken

@christangey
@kilomikebravo

Thanks Camino, I presume you mean playing proxy files from the DJI go 4 app through the LG app to the TV? Not sure if you could display in HLG that way for all sorts of reasons. But is that what you mean?

 

[FormerMember07122019_2]

Thanks Camino, I presume you mean playing proxy files from the DJI go 4 app through the LG app to the TV? Not sure if you could display in HLG that way for all sorts of reasons. But is that what you mean?

I shoot 4K in H.264 and transfer the files from my SD card, then edit them on my iPad and show them directly on the LG TV. Don’t know whether the LG app can handle HLG. I’m not exactly sure of the details of an HLG format. Is it a color space? It’s been quite a while since I got into the nitty gritty of digital video formats. The edits I do are only basics like cuts, fades, titles, and soundtracks.

Ken

Edit: I figured out what HLG is all about. I need to look if my TV can play that format.

 

[FormerMember07122019_2]

Ken: Personally, I've never used an iPad or any other tablet for editing stills or videos. As for the LG app, thanks for the tip, I'll check into it. I just keep a WD MyCloud drive on the network and play all my clips from there from any of the televisions.

Yea, that’s the better setup. That’s my ultimate goal. The only thing I have not looked into, is what media player I need to use on the network drive that will work with my TV. I think if I get a drive that is DLNA compatible I should be OK. A bit of research left to do.

Ken

 

[christangey]

I shoot 4K in H.264 and transfer the files from my SD card, then edit them on my iPad and show them directly on the LG TV. Don’t know whether the LG app can handle HLG. I’m not exactly sure of the details of an HLG format. Is it a color space? It’s been quite a while since I got into the nitty gritty of digital video formats. The edits I do are only basics like cuts, fades, titles, and soundtracks.

Ken

That's fine Ken, it'll still look really good but not showing the full potential, especially depth of color.

HLG is an HDR format developed by BBC and NHK Japan so it is not only HDR but in H625 and 10 bit color not 8 bit like the H264 capability of the M2P. Might just seem like numbers but 10 bit can display 64 times the color palette of 8 bit so it is a huge difference. Also I'm not sure the bit rate from your ipad via wifi would allow much of the real quality to shine through either. Best test is to transfer your SD card master files to a USB 3 stick and go to a friendly TV retailer and plug it into an HDR capable TV, new TVs should play the files natively, then you'll see what I mean!

 

[FormerMember07122019_2]

That's fine Ken, it'll still look really good but not showing the full potential, especially depth of color.

HLG is an HDR format developed by BBC and NHK Japan so it is not only HDR but in H625 and 10 bit color not 8 bit like the H264 capability of the M2P. Might just seem like numbers but 10 bit can display 64 times the color palette of 8 bit so it is a huge difference. Also I'm not sure the bit rate from your ipad via wifi would allow much of the real quality to shine through either. Best test is to transfer your SD card master files to a USB 3 stick and go to a friendly TV retailer and plug it into an HDR capable TV, new TVs should play the files natively, then you'll see what I mean!

Thanks, while you were posting I looked it up and refreshed my memory. I understand it is along the lines of HDR10 and Dolby Vision but more compatible with broadcast but not quite as good. At one point a while back I was very deep into digital video standards and knew them quite well. Since I have been away from it my memory has tarnished at bit.

My WiFi bit rate is plenty fast but I don’t know the limitations of the iPad DV output. I think my TV is already HDR compatible since it is last years OLED model. More fun things to try.

Ken

 

[christangey]

Thanks, while you were posting I looked it up and refreshed my memory. I understand it is along the lines of HDR10 and Dolby Vision but more compatible with broadcast but not quite as good. At one point a while back I was very deep into digital video standards and knew them quite well. Since I have been away from it my memory has tarnished at bit.

My WiFi bit rate is plenty fast but I don’t know the limitations of the iPad DV output. I think my TV is already HDR compatible since it is last years OLED model. More fun things to try.

Ken

Go for it Ken! Of course if you're into the technical side, the other thing I forgot to mention is that HLG records natively in Rec2020 color space, not the old Rec709 and as I don't have an HDR monitor, my clips are still color graded and mastered on Rec 709. "The Rec. 2020 (UHDTV/UHD-1/UHD-2) color space can reproduce colors that cannot be shown with the Rec. 709 (HDTV) color space" Rec. 2020 - Wikipedia

So I am STILL not seeing the absolute, full potential of a color-graded HLG Rec2020 project! I note Black Magic have just released some new HDR monitors but they are all still ridiculously expensive.

 

[brett8883]

Thanks, while you were posting I looked it up and refreshed my memory. I understand it is along the lines of HDR10 and Dolby Vision but more compatible with broadcast but not quite as good. At one point a while back I was very deep into digital video standards and knew them quite well. Since I have been away from it my memory has tarnished at bit.

My WiFi bit rate is plenty fast but I don’t know the limitations of the iPad DV output. I think my TV is already HDR compatible since it is last years OLED model. More fun things to try.

Ken

Hey if you are editing on an iPad there’s no reason for you to use h.264. The iPad is plenty capable of QUICKLY reading, rendering, and writing H.265.

For anybody reading this that doesn’t understand H.264 and H.265 are codecs which is a play on the words “code and decode” and it is how the video file is structured and compressed.

The biggest difference between the two is how efficiently the two codecs use storage space and how much computer power they take to export your edited video once you are done editing it.

For example I recently exported a video from Final Cut Pro that was 8GB in H.264 but when I exported the same project in H.265 it was only 1.25GB. There is no visual difference between the two files but their size. Having a smaller file will also help with playback and streaming over wi-fi.

It use to be that exporting a video in H.265 would take many many many times longer. However, the iPad(2017 and newer) have special chips that allow them to process H.265 at lighting speed. I’m talking faster then most computers.

So @Camino Ken if you are already editing on an iPad I really can’t think of a good reason for you to use h.264. It takes up more space or is lower quality and on the iPad actually takes longer to process then H.265 aka HEVC(High Efficiency Video Codec) To me this is a no brainer.

 

[FormerMember07122019_2]

Hey if you are editing on an iPad there’s no reason for you to use h.264. The iPad is plenty capable of QUICKLY reading, rendering, and writing H.265.

For anybody reading this that doesn’t understand H.264 and H.265 are codecs which is a play on the words “code and decode” and it is how the video file is structured and compressed.

The biggest difference between the two is how efficiently the two codecs use storage space and how much computer power they take to export your edited video once you are done editing it.

For example I recently exported a video from Final Cut Pro that was 8GB in H.264 but when I exported the same project in H.265 it was only 1.25GB. There is no visual difference between the two files but their size. Having a smaller file will also help with playback and streaming over wi-fi.

It use to be that exporting a video in H.265 would take many many many times longer. However, the iPad(2017 and newer) have special chips that allow them to process H.265 at lighting speed. I’m talking faster then most computers.

So @Camino Ken if you are already editing on an iPad I really can’t think of a good reason for you to use h.264. It takes up more space or is lower quality and on the iPad actually takes longer to process then H.265 aka HEVC(High Efficiency Video Codec) To me this is a no brainer.

Thanks Brett8883,

I completely understand and appreciate this education. I wasn’t sure if the iPad can handle it, now I know. My reason for H.264 is because I don’t have a lot of interest in doing any post image processing. I edit for content and flow, add titles and music and I am done. I played around with image and video processing a while ago and could never catch the bug to go any deeper. On top of this I am not that demanding of my final output. It is only for me, family, and friends and what I end up with is fantastic in my opinion.

Thanks again.

Ken