Soviet Montage Productions, a company in San Francisco that focuses on making short films, has produced the world’s first HDR video and it’s absolutely gorgeous.
Though high dynamic range imaging can be traced back to the 1800s, it is a relatively new trend in the imaging world, being featured in the new iOS 4.1 update for Apple products. Basically, HDR imaging takes an underexposed and overexposed version of a snapshot and combines them to form an extremely vivid end result, displaying a wider range of intensity levels captured in the picture.
In the video shot by Soviet Montage Productions, they used two Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR cameras to film the overexposed and underexposed scenes, claiming they were chosen because of their relative inexpensiveness. The sky and the segment featuring the person is particularly pretty, looking reminiscent of the graphical effects in 300. It says something that the first comparison that comes to mind for this particular way of filming reality is the special effects of a big budget movie.
it definately does look sexy, i like making hdr images using multiple exposures personally as well.
dunno if id want to see an entire movie in hdr though.. it does have a slightly unnatural look to it, so it would only be suitable in certain films (as you mentioned, 300 is a great example)... still beautiful, but i prefer it in still images to movies.... you can definately see during the sample with the guy in it, that it doesnt look good in motion if not done perfectly right - but opening sample looked great.
Uhm, you guys know this has nothing to do with HDR, right? I mean, sure HDR is used to achieve the effect, but that's about it. HDR is about capturing a high dynamic range of light, in order to capture rich details in both dark and light scenes. What you guys seem to call "HDR image" or "HDR video" is merely taking that detail and crushing it to an LDR image, and creating that flat look that you see in the video, or indeed your so called "HDR images".
Basically
You will never really see true HDR video, because first, the equipment required to support from very dark blacks to very bright whites is non-existent in consumer form, and second it's not practical - a shot of the sun will blind you.
While I don't claim to understand what the fuck iNatan is saying above, I have to admit the video looks great. If i'm honest, the guy really stood out as the best big of the video - the first city scape was pretty impressive too.
Why has this not been done in the past? Surely it's as easy as filming 3D (aka two cameras?)
On our computer screen we have 8 bit for each channel... Making up to 255 shades of red, green and blue. Those colors mixed is what our display is capable of showing.
Real life on the other hand has practically infinite shades. So in the digital counter part you can only display a part of the shades (basically why the sun looks just plain white on most pics). In a real HDR image you can pan an chose which range of shades you want to see.
You might try to stay outside and take a picture of a cave. The cave will look pretty dark. Open up photoshop and try to make the inside of the cave visible. You won't succeed as the camera did not capture those details at the given exposure.
Now imagine that you take 4-5 pictures of the same scene with different exposure. If you combine them you'll have a high range of shades and you'll be able to brighten up the inner of the cave until you see something and darken the sky until you see the clouds.
Right, but then you use the high range for a purpose. You use the dynamic range to display detail in a certain exposure (or, through interpolation techniques, at varying exposures).
If we had a monitor capable of displaying that huge range of luminosity, your eyes would be the ones needing to do the "photoshopping" for you, that is, they would need to adapt to darkness to notice the details in the cave, or adapt to lightness to see details outside of the cave.
Crushing the entire range into an LDR image seems pointless to me, not to mention that the effect makes everything look very flat and lacking in light details (that's what it is basically, removal/reduction of luminosity).
Now imagine that you take 4-5 pictures of the same scene with different exposure. If you combine them you'll have a high range of shades and you'll be able to brighten up the inner of the cave until you see something and darken the sky until you see the clouds.
Heres an example. Take this picture.... (yes I know the sky is a bit borked, didn't have the metering set right for it, but I like how it turned out)
Spoiler:
merge different exposures of it..
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he knows how its achieved and whats the results are, he just doesnt agree that its an hdr image is all, and doesnt see the merit in them.
personally i think in many cases they look fantastic... the image above isnt a great example though because it looks too unnatural.. id pick the spoilered original over the hdr version personally...
but some of them look amazing and give a much better picture than just a single exposure.
he knows how its achieved and whats the results are, he just doesnt agree that its an hdr image is all, and doesnt see the merit in them.
personally i think in many cases they look fantastic... the image above isnt a great example though because it looks too unnatural.. id pick the spoilered original over the hdr version personally...
but some of them look amazing and give a much better picture than just a single exposure.
ya it was when I was still new to it. The sky's are completely blown out.
I pratically don't know anything about this genre of stuff, but from the video all I can say is that it does look great when it comes to cityscapes/ landscapes while it looks meh when it involves real people
Cityscapes seem to lend themselves best too HDR since there complex and have a lot of depth, you get a real sense of depth perception. This is obviously down to the fact there's theres a lot 'post processing' of the image in real time, if that makes any sense.
Any how, with the second shot, I think you tend to concentrate on the person more than the quality of the effect, it looks good, if a little jaggie, but some how 'super real' to the extent of looking unreal.
I've no idea what I'm talking about, guess I'm looking at it from a fairly non-technical view point.
With video games, I think Half Life 2 was one of the first with Lost Coast to introduce HDR. It looks great, although it does tend to pervade every game these days.
No, I only explained what is the difference between a real HDR image and an LDR image with range crushed, often referred to "HDR photography" incorrectly.
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