The Time is Now: HDR

[Yuckfou157]

So I've read your whole thread about HDR, something I personally dislike as W11 switches it on&off on my main monitor which turns out very dark until I switch it off and I have the normal brightness again....
But I was thinking, besides that (as always) no one in the audience will see what you're doing, if you really need this peak brightness, why are you not renting a proper 5000NITS Led wall, keep al your levels down until your beloved sunrise comes and turn the levels up until the audience gets a nice tint and start to get their sunglasses...
i.e. the 10bit color depth I get but again people probably won't see the difference in quality, but the whole brightness issue is a no brainer for me, I have a master fader standard in my mapping and lots and lots of times it hoovers around 30-50% so the Lighting guy can show off his skills and we find a nice balance between the two of us
Now I haven't dragged Arena over 7 continents and don't do opera regularly, but i do have my share of theater and other gigs besides the electronic dance scene, and I hardly remember when I used a led-wall at 100% brightness indoor as it's very disturbing and mostly, to put it simple, is too bright.

[Full Spectrum]

Thanks for your response. The problem is banding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_banding

Most of us will have experienced this somewhere, and certainly anyone who has worked with a video wall has. The point is, with Resolume only able to address 256 shades in each channel, regardless of what the LED wall or the scaler is able to accept, I will never be able to access your hypothetical 5000 nit video wall. Why? Because the jump from completely black to the minimum amount of light is 5000/256 = 20 Nits, which is equivalent to the luminance of the sky during an afternoon thunderstorm! There is simply no world in which I could open a show with some kind of dark scene and then later in the same show show a sunrise, because minimum difference in brightness from RGB 0/255 and RBG 1/255 is literally ALREADY night and day!

Remember when LED fixtures sucked because they would just snap off without smoothly dimming to black? Can you imagine going back to that? Well that's where Resolume is still, in the dark (or bright) ages.

Now, for anyone reading this wondering if there is anything that you can do, yes there is, to a degree.
As long as you are using a video wall which COULD accept a 10 bit image (which for Novastar means the MTCL 4k scaler and panels with A8s or A10 receiving chips), set the wall to HDR settings and then increase your gamma curve within that scaler to something ludicrously high, like 3.0. What that will do is assign way more of your precious 256 shades of grey to the very darkest parts of the image. Weber's Law explains why this is important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law
We notices tiny changes in stimuli in the absence of that stimulus. When in darkness, 10 nits is HUGE. But when we already are looking at a wall at 4990 nits, 10 nits is impossible to see. Now, in terms of quality, this is a massive compromise, but it is something you can do to work around the fundamental limitations of 8 bit color.

[kman1898]

Novastar’s novalct processors implementation of 10 and 12 bit pales in comparison to Brompton or Helios. It’s just not even close. The benefits you get by going 10 bit on them are basically nil. It’s not worth it.

Now for the others it’s worth it but when you’re working with they quality of a screen typically you wouldn’t want resolume anyways due to the lack luster quality of dxv compared to other better codecs.

[Full Spectrum]

Exactly. I insist on companies renting Tesseras now, exclusively. If for whatever reason I need to use Resolume over D3 now for shows with video walls, I've had to just use Prores, which in my mind defeats the whole point of using Resolume to begin with.

Of course I think this all gets at a fundamental ideology within the Resolume dev team to prioritize developing a lightweight and fast rendering program that can do big things on even the most basic laptops... and I can't fault them for that. Whenever I work with tiny venues, knowing that I can work with whatever they happen to have is a real boon, but the technology around us - and audience's expectations of it - are vastly improving, all while Resolume and DXV are standing still. It's getting quickly left behind.

[UON]

I FEEL THIS.
HDR output from Resolume is something I desire every time I use it. All my content is designed for 10bpc color minimum + 1000 nits of range, being limited to 8-bit SDR when I have displays capable of so much more evokes sadness in my heart and soul (and mostly eyes)

I'm not even asking for the DXV codec to support 10bit yet, even just having Resolume allow 10-12bpc output is enough. It has the option of processing everything internally in 16bpc correct? So just crunch that down to 10-12bpc when outputting instead of 8bpc!

The rest I can mess with gamma settings or luts to adjust what the HDR looks like but removing that 8 bit output limit would be incredible!

[Zoltán]

I personally dislike as W11 switches it on&off on my main monitor which turns out very dark until I switch it off and I have the normal brightness again....

Yes, that's how HDR works, it can't make your display magically brighter. 10 or 16 bit output is not the same as HDR.
To have the highlights appear brigther it will dim everything else.
That's where tone mapping comes in.
So what kind of tone mappings do you use to create your HDR content?

[GameSofter]

I too am yearning for higher bit depth output from resolume.

I used it quite extensively at a previous job and now am looking to move my new place to it for all the reasons we love it so much. But as we produce highly dynamic shows with large swings in brightness, my creative team is always complaining about the look of their darkly mastered content through our current solution and I'm not going to get any support from my lighting or creative teams if I say "lets move to this awesome program" that won't fix our most common pain point.

To echo Full Spectrum, so many of the competitors have 10+bit output as an option, and Resolume will quickly get left behind as a "professional" solution if this lags for much longer.

I so badly want to recommend this as our solution, but as the clock ticks we get closer and closer to being forced to pick a Pixera, D3, etc...