Deliver HDR to YouTube With DaVinci Resolve | HLG Edition 

I couldn’t agree more! It never hurts to learn 👍

I also used a monitor lut and got good results. May have to dial down on saturation.

Note that some of the settings are layed out differently in the more recent versions of resolve. Don’t hesitate to look up a more up to date video covering this topic. Good luck 🤞

@@FilmResolved Thanks a lot, mate. I've found another guy who graded his footage using LG CX 4K HDR tv, and watched it through my 4K HDR tv native youtube app and it looked insanely good! My main plan was getting Sony X95K tv as it hits 1,500nits as I always use TV's for my PC's since like 2007 and I game on it as well. Have you tried that out? My current PC has Radeon VII and can use my PC in HDR mode. I know it might not be 100% accurate, but sometimes you need to grind your way up as those "cheapest" 4K HDR monitors for reference with 1000nits are setting at around $5000, making Apple's outrageous 1600nits, $5000 without the stand sound like a bargain. Actually, it's the best among those with 1600nits peak and 1000nits sustained. But I still don't have the budget for it, for now.

You’re very welcome 😀

NETFLIX has their own page on post production workflow required. Check their website.

You can upload a custom conversion LUT as metadata to avoid RU-vids automatic SDR conversion.

@@FilmResolved Do you need to upload the lut as a url link or can it be included in the metadata injector?

I believe it’s meant to be with the metadata injector. I would double check RU-vid’s help page for the full breakdown. There’s a link to that in the description 🤙

That is because HLG is 2.4 OOTF, while SDR on RU-vid is applying sRGB gamma. LOL. Just buy LG C9 with 2.4 gamma support.

I did go ahead and give it a try following your instructions and using the LUT I mentioned. Here's the result: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-S4SSZ4CgQOM.html It actually doesn't look all that bad. In SDR the colors do look kinda muted, but watching in HDR (which RU-vid had no trouble recognizing, props to you for that) the brightness does seem (subjectively, to my untrained eye) to exceed SDR levels, and there's certainly more color saturation. But I'm still worried that using that DJI LUT might have restricted the range of color in the final result. Also, I don't know if this is even related, but I did notice some very subtle rainbow-colored banding artifacts in the bright white clouds of some shots. I don't know if that's a clue I messed something up.

Hey there. First of all, your footage look SICK! Awesome location :) Note I viewed in SDR as I'm at my work station and not my HDR living room tv. Without knowing how the LUT was designed and thus how its behaving in this case (which it wasnt really meant for) its hard to tell for sure so everything I say is specualtion so take it with a grain of salt :) My gut says that the LUT was created in a Rec.709 environment and would therefore restrict the signal quite badly. That said there is nothing to stop you from using it as a starting point and further manipulating on top of it. Granted if the signal is clamped badly and you try build beyond the LUT you may find the image breaking and resulding in artifacts. I would recommend looking at the CIE Chromaticity scope and turn on Rec.709 as the "Additional Gamut". This will allow you to see if colors are going beyond Rec.709 very clearly. My thoughts would be that you are taking HLG, clamping to Rec.709 and packing a Rec.709 space into a Rec.2020 container at delivery that has headroom thats accidently not being used. One last point is are you doing any extra nodes and if you are, are you doing them before or after the LUT?

​@@FilmResolved Thanks for responding, and thank you for the kind words! For my first attempt I didn't make any adjustments other than applying the LUT. There are a few shots (like the one at the very beginning where it's pretty under-exposed) that probably need manual correction. Also in general the front-lit shots look *much* better than the back-lit ones, and ideally I'd like to do something about that, but that might be beyond my abilities. So to answer your question, if I make another attempt at grading it I suppose I might add more nodes. I'll take your advice about monitoring the CIE Chromaticity scope and turning on the Additional Gamut. Also, I found a post on DJI's forums inquiring if there were any LUTs tailored to Rec2020. Doesn't look like they ever got a response. But that at least tells me I'm not the only one thinking about this.

@@AdamLeuer There is a nice LUT available; The Leeming LUT for such use. I shoot in D-Log (not HLG) but it is a great starting point. Watch your ND filters and the water / condensation formation on the lens when shooting "in the clouds" at that density altitude. Create a serial node for further changes, which allows you to turn on / off as you like to compare. Remember DJI made that LUT for D Log to Rec.709 only. I have not seen them release any Rec.2020 LUT's for any of their cameras. They don't want to change that Hasselblad color scene ingrained. Hope this makes sense.

I'm afraid it hard to answer with out looking at all of your project settings. There are some many little things that could be slightly off and it's so easy to miss. One thing I always say to people in your situation though is make sure the upload is finished processing. Many times its just been a case of the video hadn't finished processing yet.

@@FilmResolved that’s a great point. It does take a long time to process. It did finish and my tv does not identify it as hdr like it usually does on RU-vid - plus it looks terrible (not like it does when I am editing with my hdr monitor). I must have messed up a setting in resolve. Quick question: what does an hdr video look like on a non hdr screen? When I open it with QuickTime on my computer. It has a washed out flat look, but there is a chroma.

At the time of making this video an additional video card from BMD was needed to sucessfully transmit the HDR metadata to a HDR display. I took a looking to the most up to date manuel and there is no longer a mention of this, however it does specify the use of a HDMI 2.0a cable. My guess (and this is totally a guess based on the little information I have) is for one reason or another, perhaps a non-compatible cable, you're not actually displaying the HDR signal to your HDR display. This could lead you to grade it as SDR with your eyes. If this is the case the image would look normal (not washed out) within resolve but once exported and viewed in Quicktime, presuming quicktime isn't as pedantic about HDR playback as resolve, it will play back the HDR with your accidental SDR grade contained within causing that washed out look. The best way to tell is to look at your waveform scope. If I am right and you have resolve set up for HLG, the waveform will read a max brightness of 1000nits and your grade will have its brightest values sitting much lower...probably closer to 100nits. My appologies if I'm totally off. I am admiditly taking a bit of a shot in the dark with trouble shooting this!

@@FilmResolved I do have the blackmagic video card. And my grade does go to about 1000 nits. My monitor recognizes the hdr signal and when I turn it on, it tells me so with the words HDR onscreen. I must have a setting off somewhere. Thanks for trying!

@@LoveWhatYouDo Okay great! Then the next thing to do is confirm if the render was correctly embedded with the HDR metadata. I use a media player call MPC-HC. Open the file with this and right click on the screen to reveal your options. Open properties and go to the third tab called MediaInfo. scroll down a little to "Color Primaries", "Transfer Characteristics" and "Matrix coefficients". These will confirm the Gamma and Gamut of your render. If these are correct and are what RU-vids spces are (PQ or HLG for the gamma and Rec.2020 for Gamut) then it should uplaod without issue, so my guess is that this is where something has gone wrong. If these are correct though, I'm afriad the problem is beyond my understanding of the subject.

Hi, so there's a lot to cover here so we might need to do a bit of back and forth. I would also like the prefice that its definetly strange that at 1080p its all good but not at 4k so It sure sounds like youre doing everthing right but lets trouble shoot anyway :) Firstly are you sure you're rendering 10bit? H.265 can be 10 bit if your hardware supports it but not nessessarely, it could accidently be 8-bit. The problem as you' ve described it is to do with the gamma side of HDR not color space (Rec.2020) so lets talk about that. Are you using HLG or PQ? these are the two transfer functions youtube accepts. HLG is limited to 1000 nits but thats just HLG...not youtubes decision. PQ on paper is up to 10,000 nits If you're using PQ then youtube needs a bit more information about matering settings to display it correctly which means you need to do a little more work in resolve to comply. Without this extra metadata youtube will automatically set these extra parameters to be as if the footage was mastered on a Sony BVM-X300. Check out youtubes help page about its HDR settings, it has lierally everything you need to know about successfully uploading HDR contnt to the platform. support.google.com/youtube/answer/7126552?hl=en Lastly in the past I have had 4k files take quite a while to process but they got there eventually...so also check in on the videos again if they're still on line and see if they have been fully processed and behaving correctly.

Davinci Resolve A - Z I’m going to try a few of your suggestions. How do I know or where can I find the setting for 10 bit with H265? I’m either thinking that I had my bit rate set too high or maybe I was encoding them outside of PQ or HLG. Though, it wouldn’t explain why the TV was able to pick up on the HDR up to 1080 P, but after that fail to trigger the TVs. What I have been doing is setting the HDR limit to 10,000 for future proofing. So I’m thinking that may have had something to do with it, as whatever container I was using maybe didn’t support it. So I’m going to try PQ and see what happens. I’ve had videos that I uploaded months ago still have the same issue, so I don’t think it’s a timing thing with RU-vid encoding. The odd thing is, I followed yours and others suggestions to the T and unfortunately have had the same issue. It’s maddening, because they trigger the TVs at the lower resolutions, but not at 4K. It was making me think that RU-vid was limiting the people who could upload 4K HDR material. But I truly don’t think that’s it. At least I hope it’s not.

When it comes to h.265 and having the ability to do 10bit you’re at the mercy of your hardware so you’ll have to check compatibility but if you do have the ability change the profile to Main 10. You can double check the bit depth after it’s been rendered too. It could also be worth trying DNxHR HQX. Big file sizes but definitely 10 bit and for the sake of testing and trouble shooting could be worth it. I’m a little confused by your workflow though? You’re mastering at 10000 nits but your only able to currently monitor 2500 so your not actually seeing your grade. And if your going to try PQ now then that would suggest you had been trying HLG which is a max of 1000nits so could you outline your workflow?

The Badboy Live follow up. I just checked out the videos on your channel, they play as HDR no problem. They’re PQ / Rec.2020. I would strongly suggest you master to what you’re actually able to see because grading blind is not future proofing but that’s just my two scents. As to why you can’t get them to play hdr in 4K who knows. Only thing I would say is on my HDR tv the RU-vid app is pretty unreliable, are you viewing through an app on the tv?

My Samsung Series 6 TV does the Same thing. I always have to go into General settings and turn on HDMI UHD Color for the Inputs. Then Refresh and it will show HDR in the RU-vid cog wheel. Hope this helps. (Sony Bravia does not make me do this).

Very good question and you’re on the money in terms of most consumer displays are P3, my tv included and I actually looked into this when researching for this video. On youtubes recommendations page they say not to use P3 as “it will produce incorrect results”. I suppose run a test and see if limiting the color space to P3 with output still as Rec.2020 results in a Rec.2020 file (which I would imagine is the case). that should keep RU-vid happy :)

Its really hard to answer this accuratly becuase I don't know what any LUT or LUTs you're thinking of using were designed to do. If you are planning on working in a color managed workflow then yes you have to set and input transform and a LUT must be designed to be part of that workflow.

You'll have to enable Dolby Vison in the color managment page in the project settings. Make sure you match the display mastering setting to the original and I believe you'll also have to reanalize the clips to update the metadata to be embeddend in the new render as Dolby Vision uses dynamic metadata rather than static metadata.

You’ll need to attach a custom conversion LUT to the metadata.

Thanks 😊

You can’t. That’s why this tutorial is simply about how to set up resolve to ensure the relevant metadata is embedded for correct delivery. This is not a HDR grading tutorial.

@@FilmResolved OK. You can monitor HLG, but only with extra 3rd party box which injects HLG flagging to HDMI.

Yes you’re correct or at the time of making the video that was the case. I’m still waiting for the official release of resolve 17 and therefore it’s manual to see if this has changed. In the current manual it’s stated that one of the two pieces of hardware mentioned in this video are needed to send the relevant metadata over HDMI to a HDR monitor.

Are you using the studio version?

@@FilmResolved Mine is gone altogether I have Davinci Resolve Studio 17

Once you drop a clip into a timeline the FPS is locked in. What you need to do is create a new timeline. Go to timeline settings, uncheck “use project settings” and enter you’re desired setting…24p. with a 24p timeline created, go to your old timeline and select everything and copy (Ctrl+a and ctrl+c) and paste into the new timeline (ctrl+p). Take a look to make sure things are still timed correctly, fusion titles can be thrown out of sync, once your happy with the timing your can now render in 24p

I don't know about you, but there's an option in my colour management tab in Studio 17 that allows me to view HDR content on my main display. My main display seems to handle it fine, no cards or anything. But I'm not on Windows so I don't know if there's a difference. I don't own an HDR-capable Windows device.

just noticed u mentioned youtuber accepts PQ as well as HLG and this video was for hlg, well I wish u also had a video on PQ, bcz I think that is wht I am looking for as my source files are PQ.

I would be hesitant to do a video on PQ because even though I know the process (on paper), as I do not have a HDR monitor / screen recorder I wouldnt be able to do it justice. With this HLG version, it's a much simpler process and I was just about able to pull off convaying the information correctly. I think me doing one on PQ would cuase more harm than good. That said what is happen with you is... When exporting PQ you must add a little extra information so RU-vid knows how to decode your video accuratly (or any decoder for that matter) the main bit of info being to do with your mastering displays setting (peak brightness etc.). If RU-vid does not have this info it defaults to the Sony BVM-X300 mastering display. As a result the image is probably not looking as it should. You can get all the info you need about this process on youtubes page about their HDR delivery requirments: support.google.com/youtube/answer/7126552?hl=en

@@FilmResolved I appreciate you taking the time to explain that, however I was able to figure it out by accident and my issue was fixed, still thanks a lot for explaining :)

No problem, glad to hear you got it fixed and my apologies for not seeing oyur reply sooner!

It’s only available in the studio version so if you’re using the free edition of resolve it’ll be greyed out I’m afraid.

@@FilmResolved Hi thanks hope your channel gonna grow

You can use it.

Have you checked to see what “stats for nerds” on RU-vid says? Let’s start by confirming that the files has embedded with the correct metadata first. 👍

@@FilmResolved I just checked that, it says Rec.709 on the TV. It also says processing HD on all my uploads. Is it possible that the metadata did not go through? Or could RU-vid still be processing the files?

By the way, really appreciate you responding so fast. Thank you. I checked the file on my PC and it’s definitely BT.2020. I tried PQ, HLG, H.264, H.265, DNxHR HQX10 and 12. No luck on any of them.

Here are all the versions, maybe you can see something I don’t. I’m just so frustrated right now. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-K0y1BeUPPYs.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-dizvKCnhkco.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-g7Cp5eofwcA.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pZ72X55DCwU.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-97G_ppPx5aA.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-LpjRSgbTlwo.html

Let’s wait till they’re finished processing as this can definitely have an impact on it!

Yes you’ll need the studio version. To my knowledge no you can’t just get an activation code and I get your frustration I really do, I had great difficulty getting my hands on a licence in Ireland. What I would say though is that $300 is the RRP and when I bought mine it’s came to a little over €300 including local tax so the camera shop I bought it from did the right thing and included taxes to meet the RRP so if you’re supplier is cool it shouldn’t be an issue.

@@FilmResolved yeah i just bought it and shipped it to a friend in us so that i can get the activation code from her instead. 😅

Oh nice work around! 😂 enjoy, the studio version is worth every penny IMO

@@FilmResolved yeah modern problems require modern solutions 🤣

My guess is that something in the delivery settings is wrong. Double check your codec type, perhaps you chose something very large there by accident?

@@FilmResolved I just looked again, I'm using the exact settings from your video.

Actually wait, sorry, I did make a mistake, but then fixed it (went from DNxHR 444 10 bit to DNxHR HQX 10 bit) and it went down to 6gb for 48 seconds, but that's still seems absurdly high. The original HLG file, which is several minutes long, is under 3GB. And thanks for your quick reply!

Yeah but the original codec is probably much more compressed so it’s getting inflated. The best root IMO (for RU-vid delivet that is) is .mov h.265 and make sure you choose “Main 10” profile as this is 10bit. The reason I didn’t feature this in this tutorial is because access to this codec is highly depend on your hardware where as DNx isn’t. I knew I’d get a tonne of complaints if I went with h.265 in this video. Hopefully you have access to this, the trick choose a codec that’s 10bit and is accepted by RU-vid. Let me know how you get on with this :)

@@FilmResolved I didn't have the full (studio) version of resolve so didn't have access to H265, so I bought it (the seller emailed me the key). And...it worked!! 168MBs and it's HDR that windows 10 can play! Thank you so much for your help!

No Problem dude! The song is Black Goldie by Eyal Raz and I got it from Arlist.io

@@FilmResolved you da man! Thanks 😊

I’m positive, all the samples I have in the description are using h.265. There are different levels of compression though so be sure that you are using a 10 bit version. So in resolve, choose a minimum of Main10 under encoding profile. If I had to guess you may be accidentally rendering a Main profile which is 8bit. Apologies in advance if my assumption is wrong but 8 vs 10 bit is the likely culprit that’s jumping out at me with the little info I have on you situation.

@@FilmResolved The video is definitely 10-bit - if it weren't, my Vizio wouldn't be triggering HLG on the same files. (I know from experience that like most non-Sony TVs, it will NOT trigger HLG with anything 8-bit, e.g. playing anything from a Sony camera without transcoding to bitstuff it is no bueno.) Mediainfo is reporting a bit depth of 10 bits: Bit depth : 10 bits Interestingly, it almost looks like Resolve H.264 output to RU-vid (e.g. compliant with their recommendations) is not possible - Resolve won't do 10-bit H.264 as far as I can tell, at least not with nvidia hardware encoding. So it's either H.265 or DNxHR unless doing an intermediary transcode (ugh...) I'm going to run an experiment to see if somehow using CQ instead of VBR HQ for rate control is making RU-vid unhappy.

@@FilmResolved I can't choose the way I want to export, just H 264 h265 vimeo twitter and youtube at h264 . How can I add a custom export option?

@@Entropy512 Did you figure this out? I'm stuck in the same boat. Everything seems right, but I cannot get my TV to recognise the HDR.

Absolutely. If you’ve ever graded log footage it’s essentially the same thing or you could use color space transform to do the heavy lifting for you and make some adjustment to tastes Its totally normally to shoot HLG for its dynamic range and still deliver to Rec.709 :)

Going to need a lot more info than that. How are you monitoring your grade? What media player are you viewing the export in? Some players don’t playback some codecs corrects and can cause color shifts. Is the color shift happening upon upload to RU-vid? Can you confirm the color space and gamut of your export? Either via compatible media player or stats for nerds upon upload to RU-vid? There is a lot of reason for this so hopefully we can start tracking it down?

@@FilmResolved Yeah, so I export bt2020 and works fine when you play on anything HDR capable with correct colour. For example, i upload to RU-vid dnxhr 10 bit, and when you play the uploaded video on hdr tv it plays back fine. However, if you play the same video on a non-hdr capable display, all the colours shift to red. I know that this is therefore a youtube issue. What do you suggest to upload as to combat this?

On RU-vid’s helps pages there is a guide on how to upload an accompanying HDR to SDR conversion LUT with with the metadata so that the SDR conversion doesn’t go crazy. That way the SDR version will also look how you intended.

Thanks

If you can't afford the very low cost of DVR Studio you can't afford HDR post processing. You need an expensive card/hardware box plus an expensive monitor. Stick to what you know.