HDR Color Troubleshooting

Making great looking HDR files that playback on Flow Capture opens up a workflow that is full of fine details and settings that can be overlooked. This guide will help keep you on track or get you back where you need to be. 

If you still have trouble or can't find an answer in here, please reach out to support@moxion.io and we'll help you out!

Video Range

The question of Full v Legal range is something of a moving target that can vary depending on your codec and change as ProRes becomes more capable.

  • HEVC - We recommend that you go with full range. In Baselight, that's using the no scale/clip option. 
  • ProRes - This should be legal (in Baselight, that's the legal scale/unclipped option). If you're using the Dolby Encoder, any 444 variants should be set to full range. 

If there is metadata in the ProRes file or its xml indicating whether it should be full range, Flow Capture will respect that setting. 

Color Tagging

Another helpful check if you're on an Apple computer can be to make sure your QuickTime color space is properly tagged. This one can be tricky because there's no industry-wide, agreed upon standard right now. That said, we've still got recommendations that are applicable to both types of HDR:

  • Dolby Vision - Tagging as either 12-16-1 or 12-16-9 will give (or indicate) the correct color space. 
  • HDR10 - This should be 9-16-10 or 9-16-1.

If you're using Baselight, this can be found in the setting for Colourspace tagging. The option for Legacy will give you a default, but if it's set to Automatic, you'll receive one of the above based on your project.

Checking Your Metadata

We've found that the programs you're outputting these files from (Baselight, Resolve, etc.) generally aren't the best at reading the metadata they've generated. For this reason, we like using MediaInfo if we ever have to check something in the metadata of an asset.

Another helpful place to do a spot-check for the color tag is available to Mac users in the Finder. If you right click on any video asset and choose Get Info, then open the More Info section, you'll find the tags in the Color Profile section.

Note that you'll need to be running at least OS X Catalina (10.15.x) to be able to see this accurately.

If you're exporting Dolby Vision from DaVinci Resolve, here's a helpful guide on how to do just that!