Hardon Williams
Member
Eclipsa Video is another HDR format, this one built on SMPTE ST 2094-50, an open standard Google put together with Apple and NBCUniversal. The pitch is consistency: the same clip should look the same on your phone, your tablet and your TV, and you should stop getting slapped in the face by a brightness jump when one video ends and the next begins.
The interesting part is how it gets there. Every existing format hands your display some metadata and lets the TV decide what to do with it, which is why the same HDR10 file looks like three different films on three different sets. Eclipsa instead ships instructions on how a compatible display should render the image, sets a reference white for normal brightness, and leaves headroom above that for highlights to scale to whatever the panel can actually do. It also takes ambient light into account. The metadata is dynamic, frame by frame, so on that axis it is closer to Dolby Vision than to HDR10.
My problem with all of this is not technical, it is political. Telling a TV exactly how to render an image means telling Samsung, LG, Sony and Hisense to switch off the picture processing they spend their entire marketing budget bragging about. Every one of those companies believes its tone mapping is the reason you bought the set. The format that finally fixes HDR inconsistency will die on that hill unless the manufacturers are contractually leashed, and an open standard has no leash.
Google plus Apple plus NBCU is not a small coalition though, and it costs nothing to license, which is more than Dolby can say. Does anyone see this actually shipping on a TV, or is it a YouTube and phone format that stops at the living room door?
The interesting part is how it gets there. Every existing format hands your display some metadata and lets the TV decide what to do with it, which is why the same HDR10 file looks like three different films on three different sets. Eclipsa instead ships instructions on how a compatible display should render the image, sets a reference white for normal brightness, and leaves headroom above that for highlights to scale to whatever the panel can actually do. It also takes ambient light into account. The metadata is dynamic, frame by frame, so on that axis it is closer to Dolby Vision than to HDR10.
My problem with all of this is not technical, it is political. Telling a TV exactly how to render an image means telling Samsung, LG, Sony and Hisense to switch off the picture processing they spend their entire marketing budget bragging about. Every one of those companies believes its tone mapping is the reason you bought the set. The format that finally fixes HDR inconsistency will die on that hill unless the manufacturers are contractually leashed, and an open standard has no leash.
Google plus Apple plus NBCU is not a small coalition though, and it costs nothing to license, which is more than Dolby can say. Does anyone see this actually shipping on a TV, or is it a YouTube and phone format that stops at the living room door?
