The next speaker was a ‘local’ from the TV content business in Los Angeles. David Stump is chairman of the camera committee and display committee of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). He gave a cinematographer’s eye view on displays.
Stump said that frame rates and interpolation on current TVs are the big gripes from other cinematographers. They want the ability to turn off the smoothing and anti-judder features that are built into current sets. However with HDR and Rec. 2020, he expects that the industry may have to go to high frame rates, because of the increased sensitivity to judder..
New sets are supplied in demo mode or standard home mode, but that is not good for image quality. Stump is optimistic that HDR may mean that TV makers get rid of the ‘Best Buy’ mode and that is a good thing as most consumers don’t have the knowledge to set up the TV well.
HDR is causing cinematographers to rethink everything about the way they do things. That’s a big challenge. As well as higher bit depths and wider gamut as well as frame rates, there is a move to higher brightness, but it’s not clear yet where the mainstream market will be in terms of set brightness, so it is hard to decide what brightness to grade to.
There are a lot of challenges. For example, photobacking of cloudy skies or through a window becomes very obviously false, so you may need to go to a real location for something that would have been a studio shot in the past. Headlights on a car in a night scene can flicker badly and that means that 24fps may become a dying format. There are also a lot of mastering challenges because of the number of formats and there are real issues in deciding what order to do things in. For example, if Stump grades the HDR first, it spoils him for the rest. It’s much better to start with SDR and ‘work up’ to the best, he finds.
HDR really causes trouble with motion judder and will become a very big problem and there is a need for new capture techniques. Stump talked about RealD’s TrueMotion (see High Frame Rate Mastering War Stories). He likes this solution as it allows a 24fps master to be created from the captured content.
