With unwavering consumer demand for entertainment, more content providers looked to high dynamic range (HDR) and wide colour gamut (WCG) in 2024 to differentiate their offering in a crowded market, a trend we expect to continue next year.
Even though HDR’s value is undeniable, questions remain about best practices for producing and delivering it, especially regarding colour management. While the arrival of new technologies this past year addressed some of these concerns, the M&E industry’s HDR journey is far from complete.
Charting innovations in 2024
Not only did we see more cinemas embrace HDR content for the first time and major sporting events like the Summer Games and EURO 2024 opt for HDR as a production standard, we also saw increased HDR content produced at regional levels.
New reference monitors featuring quantum dot OLED technology hit the market at lower price points, offering a broader colour gamut, larger peak brightness, and better viewing angles, while advanced SDR to HDR remastering tools enabled more productions and content providers with SDR libraries to rapidly transform SDR content to Dolby Vision HDR for OTT delivery. More native HDR products, fresh new products featuring conversion capabilities and 3D look-up-tables (LUTs), and HDR conversion orchestration technology have further changed the game.
Confronting challenges head-on
HDR and the technology behind it are fundamentally changing how broadcast, production, and post production professionals think about colour management. Many productions today capture in HDR, even if delivering in SDR, and must juggle multiple HDR and SDR technologies across the chain, each introducing unique colour management complexities that cannot be ignored.
Graphics is one area of difficulty where the technology must continue to mature, which newly released plug-ins for popular creative applications could help. Signalling issues are also still pervasive; some tools strip away metadata that enables other devices to recognise HDR signals, prompting challenges downstream. Then, there are camera matching hurdles, as many live productions employ a mix of SDR and HDR cameras, including cinema and PTZ cameras. All the camera outputs must be balanced to ensure colour consistency. On the distribution end, delivering over-the-top HDR delivery is relatively mature, but that’s not yet the case for terrestrial broadcasts.
Outside of these challenges, organisations are experimenting with HDR workflows to determine what works best, understand the science behind colour management, and secure the right talent to support it. Proper display calibration is one area where more consideration is needed, as it’s paramount to making proper colour decisions. All these challenges, however, introduce new opportunities. As more productions embrace HDR and dive deeper into colour management, they’re quickly realising the value of talent that understands colour management intricacies, unlocking new job opportunities, from HDR supervisor to colour pipeline manager and beyond.
Predicting future outcomes
In 2025, HDR’s growing influence on every stage of the content lifecycle will become more pronounced, making conversations around colour management difficult to avoid. Now is the time for stakeholders across the content chain to give more thought to colour pipelines and plan accordingly. An SDR-first, HDR-later approach will no longer be sufficient. Embracing an HDR-first strategy will be crucial to delivering everything HDR and WCG have to offer viewers. This will require a deeper understanding of the available colour management tools and their roles in HDR production. Success also hinges on the industry coming together to better standardise colour management terminology, from colour gamuts, spaces, and ranges to growing technical understandings of the steps to achieving proper colour management for their specific application.
Next year, I expect more educational material and resources around HDR and colour management to surface, alongside new, more accessible tools that will enable professionals to see their potential final pixel earlier in the production process. When it comes to HDR and colour management in 2025, the future is looking brighter.
