HDR4EU is a European initiative on quality and extensive improvements
CineEurope 2019
One of the proposals presented by Creative Europe Media during CineEurope in Barcelona is a project called HDR4EU in which different academic centres participate, as well as well-established companies within the audiovisual sector, and more specifically the film industry.
The main goal of HDR4EU is to position EU companies in the creative sector as world leaders in the emerging HDR format through the production, experimentation and demonstration of a set of professional tools, techniques and guidelines that allow the emergence of an HDR ecosystem, with a remarkably superior experience for the audience in terms of image quality and content personalisation.
Ensuring industry adoption is a key aspect of HDR4EU. All of their outcomes will be validated, demonstrated and disseminated.
It is intended that this great joint effort will be reflected in guidelines on how to film and post-produce material at this format, how to use new tools for conversion between HDR and SDR, as well as standard and wide color ranges, and their corresponding management and correction.
This project not only focuses on cinema, but also has some variants ranging from broadcasting to broadband Internet websites, television programs and personalization tools that allow an individual and unique experience for each viewer. Arri, Barco, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Brainstorm, FilmLight and Smoke&Mirrors are the partners involved in it.
Trevor Canham, an American researcher, is one of the people who is dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s for HDR4EU. There are two different research groups from Pompeu Fabra University working on this project: the Image Processing for Enhanced Cinematography group (IP4EC) and the Interactive Technologies Group (GTI). He gives us more details about it:
“The project is attending to four pipelines for the high dynamic range format. Whether it’s a film or a television broadcast, the idea is to have partners working in each part of the pipeline, from the capture of images to post-production and exhibition, working together, basically developing new technologies and new methods in tandem for this new format, so that we can get inside from each other on what can be done in the different parts of the project and ultimately make products which, instead of limiting what we’re creating, allow them to maximize what they can do”.
– What is different here from other systems?
The big difference is that the HDR (High Dynamic Range) increases. The dynamic range in the case of imaging refers to the range of light levels that can be captured, stored and reproduced in the systems. Therefore, the idea of high dynamic range is simply to take the very limited range that we have been using for a very long time and extending it so that we can have more details in the highlight, more details in the shadows and basically create images which are closer to the stimulus we see in the real world.
– How long have you been working on that?
I’ve been on the project since 2018, a little more than a year.
– And do you think it would be possible to see this project commercially?
Some of the members are industrial partners and, obviously, there is a part of them that in the project develop their own products for their companies. For instance, Filmlight has the color-grade software of the base light; and with respect to Arri, many of the cameras they manufacture capture the High Dynamic Range images. I’m not going to go into what’s going to happen with the content that they’re capturing for the project, but that may be available for use in the future.
Barco is making the HDR projection solution for the cinema, and as far as our University group goes and Brainstorm, as well as this company has had a great number of products for the industry for quite some time now, they are already updating the virtual studio products for HDR.
Our group at Pompeu Fabra University is working on a spin off company for some of the technologies we are making in the image processing group, so there are many different avenues that can be accessed.
– Would it be possible to implement this system on large screens?
Yes, with the help of Barco and their projection technology, we hope that the cinema with the highest capacity on average will be able to use our system, but the point is that those cinema systems which are affordable are not grossly more expensive than in standard dynamic range systems in terms of operating costs. The hope is in the adventures that are being carried out with different partners in this project, we hope to see it in the cinema in the next future or in the coming years.
– I see that there is a big and significant visual difference among this project and others.
I think maybe part of that could be the amount of industrial partners we have working on the project, which are also very established companies. Many European Union research projects have a lot more academic and start-ups representation, but, in my opinion, this project is fairly well prepared to have an industry impact, based only on the number of highly visible and active companies participating in it.
©José Luis García/Cinestel.com
