‘Not Sure’ How We Transition to Ultra HD from HD, CBS Technical Guru Says

The 4K production of the Masters “was done in a separate mobile unit, with separate cameras,” and was aired only on DirecTV, said Seidel, who's president of the Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers. “There was no integration of what they were doing into the CBS broadcast. We didn’t attempt high dynamic range for that; it was just a 4K limited-camera shoot, essentially three holes of coverage.”

During the “early production years” of live sports in HD, “it was the Noah’s Ark of production,” Seidel said Tuesday. “We had two directors, we had two camera operators, we had two TDs [technical directors], we had two audio operators, two sets of announcers, everything,” he said. “Gradually, as they gained more confidence, we were able to integrate it into a unified production.” He expects the same scenario to unfold for transitioning to 4K from HD production of live sports.

In Hollywood, CBS has installed 4K cameras, “but we’re only using them as high-definition cameras,” Seidel said. “We’re not using the 4K output. It provides some future-proofing of the installation.” But as for the transition from HD to Ultra HD, “I’m not sure how we do that, because in this country, we will not be granted additional frequencies by the government to do a parallel transition like we did for HD,” Seidel said. “The Koreans, fortunately, have been granted additional frequencies by their government so they can do a parallel production. But in this country, we don’t have that luxury.”

If one pushes HDR technology “too far,” it could well have “consequences” for consumers, including eye fatigue, Seidel said. He runs the CBS lab in New York that does comparison tests with three 65-inch monitors, Seidel said. One of the screens shows “true 4K,” the second is a 4K monitor fed with a 1080i signal, but upconverted to 4K, and the third is only 1080i, he said. “We put the identical content up on it, they’re all color-balanced, and we say ‘Which is which?’” If the viewer is situated at a screen distance that equals three times the screen height, “which is the ideal viewing distance for HD, it is very difficult to tell the difference,” Seidel said. When the viewer moves to within a distance of four feet, or 1.5 times the picture height, “then you have a good chance of guessing which is the HD,” Seidel said. “But people still confuse which is 4K and which is the upconverted version.”

The CBS lab has a fourth monitor “that we allow to do an internal upconversion through a transfer function that’s built into the monitor to high dynamic range,” Seidel said. “It’s going from a 200-nit monitor next to it to a 400-nit monitor,” he said. “After you watch that for about a half an hour, because your pupils are opening and closing, you do experience some eye fatigue. I think it’s important to realize that if you push this technology too far, it has consequences, and we have heard from color graders in Hollywood that they need a break after a half an hour of color-grading a film in high dynamic range.”

CBS just acquired two professional 1,000-nit monitors for HDR testing, Seidel said. In the manuals that came with the monitors, "it has warnings that if you experience eyestrain, just stop using it,” he said. “We can get into, I think, overuse of some of the technology, and this is what we found in audio.” In years past, CBS imposed limits of 100 dB in the audio dynamic range of its programming and commercial spots, “and some commercial advertisers abused that” to make their commercials stand out, Seidel said.

Each time industry migrates to new technologies, “we learn things,” said Matthew Goldman, senior vice president-technology in Ericsson’s TV and Media Strategy Group. HDR “is not about being brighter,” Goldman said. “It’s not cranking up your television’s brightness and contrast because you can do that,” he said. “It’s about having the difference between the brightest whites in the highlights of the display, which are very, very small regions that make it look more real, because we’re used to looking at something that’s so heavily muted.”

Sunlight reflecting off the hood of a car perhaps equals “several hundred thousand nits of brightness,” but it’s customarily displayed on a screen that’s capable of only a “few hundred” nits, Goldman said. Doing responsible HDR is like controlling “video loudness,” he said. It’s making sure there's “proper control” so “you don’t oversaturate,” he said.

Industry “is just starting to look into” what happens if advertisers want to make their spots stand out by making them overly bright, and have the HDR in those spots “be different than the main content,” Goldman said. “We do have to do a lot of study into that and look at what happens when you transition away from main content depicting an 'episodic' scene on a couch in a dark room," he said. “And then, bang! You get a really bright commercial that comes on. Think about what that would do to your eyes.”

Nevertheless, among key picture-enhancing factors like high frame rates and 4K resolution, “if you’re looking for the biggest bang -- I’m talking about the wow factor for the consumer -- independent of viewing distance, there’s nothing that looks better than a properly done high-dynamic-range representation,” Goldman said. “If you truly have a high-dynamic-range monitor, the impact can be seen from across the room.” In side-by-side tests Ericsson did comparing a 4K picture with standard dynamic range against a 1080p image with HDR, the 1080p with HDR always wins, Goldman said.