Fullmetaled, I receive updates on this thread as I’m very interested in updates from Ady and the edit. However, I’m not interested in your quest for HDR. Ady’s stated multiple times now that there won’t be an HDR grade. We have no idea what you’re talking about, or who you’re talking about, or what they said, or anything of the sorts. It doesn’t matter whether or not it can be done, all that matters is that it won’t be, and you’ve been told that several times by more than one person, again, including Adywan himself. Please stop derailing the thread.
Ah, but it is a useful discussion to understand what HDR really is. And yes, Andywan himself from his source files would be the only way to really get any useful HDR so if he has no interest (and I really don’t see the benefits since Star Wars was shot on film and is better suited to SDR due to the nature of most of the shots) then it is an academic conversation (at least on my part).
I believe that to an project like this and utilize the original HDR metadata, that your editing suite would have to import it that data, you edit the project and then it would have to generate new metadata (which I believe is encoded into the video) for the output. Similarly, if you are using something capable of it, you can have a project that was originally intended for SDR but output an HDR. It depends on the software what you need to do to achieve that, but I’ve seen several tutorial videos that show just how easy it can be (or hard in some cases, but still doable). But converting to HDR is far more than just copying the metadata.
So it doesn’t give you what was shown in theaters but better it’s more that it’s altering the picture with some films. I didn’t know that the way it was described it was get the colors that were in the actual film to be show on disc for the first time. now I’m hearing the opposite wow now I’m even more confused about what the purpose of hdr is.
Don’t confuse the level of colors and color space with color correction or color grading. Those are totally separate. I could get into a long winded explanation, but HDR does not magically make something look like it did in theaters. HDR is intended to take advantage of the higher dynamic range of modern TV’s and projectors that can deliver deeper blacks than SDR screen or film projection ever could. If you want to see what was shown in theaters, get the 4K77, 4K80, or 4K83 versions. Those are the most true to the original run and they are SDR. The Lucasfilm color grades have issues (the 2019 version less so than the 2011 version).
Prior to HDR, blacks were always grays. You cannot get true black when you use film pigments or LCD pixels to block out the light (and even less so on an old CRT). It will always be gray. HDR is for the OLED and laser projectors where the black is a complete absence of light. OLED screens have actual lighted pixel LED’s so when they are set to 0,0,0 black, they generate zero light. The same with the laser projectors. For pixels set to 0,0,0 black, they project no light for that pixel. So HDR’s real power is in showing those darker details. That can make a night scene pop in a dark theater by adding levels of darkness never before experienced. It also has more color depth so the color gradients are smoother with less possibility of noticeable color halos. When you add in compression, HDR will not show the same compression artifacts so the image will be closer to the original uncompressed image. HDR does not magically make a movie closer to the original. You have to know where its strengths are and edit accordingly. From what I’ve seen of how Star War has been delivered in HDR, the SDR masters have been faithfully converted, but there is not much difference between the 4k HDR and the HD SDR versions. If anything, OTEEDEE’s D+ version looks better and it is SDR. HDR is just a tool to take advantage of new tech and where applicable make older movies look their best, though few can truly take advantage unless the negatives are scanned in HDR and any flaws edited out.
So your saying in the case of the original trilogy hdr even a proper new hdr or Dolby vision scan wouldn’t add anything to it and would be pointless brightness black levels Etc.