Heya hedgesmfg, im extremely fascinated by your 4K HDR workflow. I’m working on a TROS fan edit myself and want to preserve 4K HDR as i believe its the best experience to watch it on my samsung tv at home.
My workflow has been for adding scenes to I would upscale fan editted scenes to 4K using Topaz Video Enhance, and then I would use Davinci resolve to add the HDR metadata in. Rec, gamma, being Rec2020, ST2084 (My “color grading” is the noob of noobs), but its the best I can do to “match” the original 4K. I would then do my video editing in final cut pro.
The issue I ran into is when I export from FCP, it has to be a 10 bit codec in order to export HDR, so the only codec available from FCP is ProRes 422. However the file size is humongous (>300-400GB), and the only way I can encode into HEVC/H.265 is to use either compressor app or handbrake, but that takes FOREVER. I was wondering if you could recommend a better easier workflow. Since you use adobe premiere pro, can that export directly to HEVC265 10 bit?
I’m working on encoding my first draft to release using handbrake.
You can check out some of the pics of my work on the thread: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/the-rise-of-skywalker-my-personal-cut-wip/id/82513
Premiere Pro handles the majority of my workflow, though I have a copy of both the 2019 and 2020 version on my HDD because the former directly imports MKV files while the latter dropped support of it but allows for slightly faster encoding.
Typically my workflow for the Clone Wars Upscale is as follows…
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Start with the original mp4 files, either from the ISO, or in already existing high bitrate (10,000kbps) encodes. Extract the audio and video files from these and convert them to lossless mp4 files via handbrake at the highest quality setting at a constant 23.97fps rate encoded in h.264. This leaves me with files about 3GB or so for each episode, but they will easily slide into any version of Adobe without issue. I’ll also extract the audio files separately as AAC files.
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Set the project resolutions (and sequence setting) to 3840x1634 (or 2160p in the case of Rebels) to set a standard for cinematic widescreen that’s roughly consistent between films and TV. Also enable Maximum Bit Depth and Render Quality in these settings to enable HDR mode in Adobe.
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Import the MP4s and layer the audio track below them, synced up frame for frame, but still listed separately for the purpose of making the cuts easier to layer and adjust in both audio and video. Each individual video segment that needs to be upscaled is then “set to frame size” which will automatically make it scale within to whatever the predefined resolution is within the sequence setting.
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With each shot coming from a different source (TV Episode, film, deleted scene, ect), if I am upscaling, I test various sharpening filters at different settings until I get a clip that correctly scales up with as many details visible as possible. It’s not the AI Topaz approach (because I find many of the AI scalers still create far too many artifacts and incorrect guesses on the source material), but I find adobe is already using something akin to a bicubic upscale algorithm that works very, very well and matches a lot of industry standards for upscales as long as you configure it properly. As I’m sure you can see in the video clips I’ve put up, Clone Wars scaled extremely well with this method and preserved excellent amounts of detail while looking ever so slightly sharper. Small tweaks in sharpness or softness filters (and in rare cases, a very tiny bit of film grain, though not for this project) can produce an extremely high quality image if balanced correctly, but there is no one consistent setting, and it will always vary depending on the quality, bitrate, and native resolution of the original source material used.
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Adobe is set to colorize in the Rec2020 standard by default. With HDR already enabled, I can then enter the coloring tab and select a preset for every single scene/sequence in whatever project I’m working on. Episodes VII-IX hit brightness settings in the 700-1000nit range on Disney Plus, so I set each project’s maximum brightness to this range too. I can then manually calibrate every single clip’s saturation, specular, black levels, white levels, shadows, exposure, contrast, highlights, and tint until I get the best looking balance for that particular clip. I typically use a fairly uniform setting across most scenes, but I could custom color every single frame of a project manually if I had too within the timeline. Scenes can be recalibrated on a cases by cases basis. My rule of thumb was to have different configurations for clips from different sources (film, deleted scene, 2D animation, 3D animation) by default, then vary it from there as needed with each scene.
Once this is done, and any edits I need to make within the timeline are complete (say, 4 episodes stitched together as a film cut with the necessary A/V transitions put in place), I can export the clip as an mp4 file encoded in x265 in either 1080p SDR (with SDR conform turned on to ensure that the newly created HDR metadata scales down properly to SDR), or 10bit 4K HDR with rec2020 colors enabled. This means the software will manually recolor every single frame in real time based on the settings I’ve put forth in my timeline using a very efficient algorithm that scans every frame and recolors each one based on a nearest neighbor/best guess scaling solution, similar to an AI algorithm. If configured correctly, you can do this with almost any source to give it a new HDR sheen, but it has to be handled carefully to work most effectively. Clone Wars was the perfect project for this process since the show was already filled with many rich and vibrant palettes that were naturally enhanced by this approach without being oversaturated. The show’s dynamic lighting FX engine was pretty much made for an HDR transfer, and they obviously upgraded it in Season 7 to scale this way, quite beautifully.
I hope that gives you a good idea behind my workflow here. Once I’ve streamlined it and get my source material organized, I can produce effective results relatively quickly. Rendering still can be a very time consuming process for even very powerful hardware (The 4.5 hour revenge of the Sith cut in 4K HDR takes 28 uninterrupted hours to render, and that’s without upscaling or even recoloring the already existing 4K HDR content), but the results speak for themselves and I can directly import existing HDR metadata without any issue (such as when I edit using a 4K HDR mkv file as a source in Premiere 2019), or recreate a new set of metadata manually.