A bit of a let down that the video demoing SDR->HDR conversion is itself only published in SDR. Makes as much sense as demoing a colorization tool in a grayscale video!
At this point, with any new model I think it makes sense to wait until you can run the model on your own input before making any assumptions based on cherry picked examples.
If they were serious about showing this tech off they should've provided a video file download. Also indicate that it's a HDR file and should only be viewed on a HDR display. Youtube is just making this look bad as people won't see a difference.
YouTube tends to post a downscaled SD version first, then they encode and post the higher-res versions when they get around to it. This can take days in some cases. Meanwhile the creator catches the flak...
You don't need high res for HDR on YouTube (144p HDR is a thing there oddly enough) and the 4k version had already processed when I posted that comment (with no change since in HDR availability). Usually media announcements/large channels pre-upload the video so it's ready when they want it to actually publish to avoid that kind of issue though.
4K processing takes just minutes, but HDR processing can take over a month to… never. There is no indication of this at all, no progress bar or eta. Just check manually every few days!
This is why everyone is giving up on HDR, it’s just too painful because the content distributors are all so bad at it, with Netflix being the sole exception.
It's more reliable then on linux though, and windows has been doing "auto HDR" for videos for years, so kinda hard to tell when something is HDR or not there.
What grinds my gears is that HDR output in a lot of software is "Mac only", even though Windows supports HDR video output just fine, and has had support for wide-color and HDR since Vista!
E.g.: DaVinci Resolve has HDR capable only in its Mac version.
Similarly, generating a Dolby Vision file is basically impossible on Windows.
"Just buy a Mac" seems to be the best and most practical guidance I've seen for HDR workflows...
At least as of a couple of years ago, HDR support on YouTube has been pretty bad[1]. I know they've been working to improve things since, but I kind of don't blame people for walking away from that mess.
I'm also glad that Rambalac is back as he quit a few months ago. I've recently also started uploading 4K60 HDR content to YouTube [1] and it takes up to one week more time for them to encode than the SDR version. You can include your own LUT instead of YouTube conversion which seems to help. Here's an article and LUT [2] + a video [3] with valuable info. They allowed me getting DJI Pocket 3 HLG recordings to HDR10.
Can´t recommend Rambalac enough - I have pretty much re-traced his steps multiple times during our Japan trip a couple times & it really helped with orientation. :)
Also some of the walks are really interesting & really gives you the context of various places in Japan. :)
- Some DaVinci Resolve Settings to use on SDR monitors: https://youtu.be/4izJfgRtkZE (though I upload 4K60 HDR at 37.5Mbit) which is enough for me slow content.
This only allows a single LUT for the entire video. For comparison, Resolve will perform Dolby Vision tone mapping from HDR to SDR on a clip-by-clip basis.
I guess. There's a lot of details we don't know that would change the calculus on this.
To use a analogous workflow, it could be like saying, "It's pointless to shoot video in 10-bit log if it's going to be displayed on Rec.709 at 8-bits." It completely leaves out available transforms and manipulations in HDR that do have a noticeable impact even when SDR is the target.
Again, we can't know if it's important given the information that's available, but we can't know if it's pointless either.