Today’s high-definition video offerings are so clear that you can practically count the pores on people’s faces, but it’s still obviously a digitally-generated image that doesn’t match the quality of the way we see things with our naked eyes. Dark scenes in movies are particularly problematic, as movie producers struggle to make their films more realistic than ever. The use of a technique that is over 150 years old, however, promises to change all of that.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) video and photography mimics images seen by the human eye better than HD video, by taking several pictures at different exposures and combining them together into one image. This method produces a more realistic-looking picture because the average human eye is used to quickly adjusting to multiple exposure levels.
"HDR is what we see every day of our lives," says Alan Chalmers, a professor at the UK’s University of Warwick. His team has devised the very first complete system for capturing, storing and displaying HDR video images, according to New Scientist.
Chalmers is claiming to have the best HDR setup out of the current competition because it covers the greatest range of f-stops, the term used to refer to the exposure level of a picture. "Twenty f-stops is a magic number, because it's what the human eye can see," he explains.
While HDR still photos are fairly easily generated using software solutions, video is a much greater challenge because of the vast amount of raw image data required. "It's a CD's-worth of data a second," according to Chalmers, although his team has produced a new compression method to make that data 100 times smaller for complex scenes and up to 500 times smaller for less complex shots.
Chalmers and his team aren’t the only ones currently working on HDR video solutions. Spheron-VR, a German visual technology company has joined the University’s team to help improve their system, while movie camera manufacturer Red is working on an HDR video product of their own.
Unfortunately, today’s televisions do not currently support HDR images, though a firmware update or converter box would remedy that issue without the need to purchase an all-new device. This support may even improve the quality of 3D video, since the human eyes make use of lighting signals to help perceive depth.
I found the difference between a standard single-exposure video and an HDR-produced video to be quite astounding. If this type of video becomes a mainstream product, I would be willing to spend the money to get a device to support it before I would buy a 3D TV.
