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Table Of Contents
168Compressor User Guide
High dynamic range (HDR)
Additionally, some newer imaging devices can display extra levels of brightness in each
color component (red, green, and blue) in a way that more closely reproduces how the
human eye perceives contrast. These high-dynamic-range (HDR) displays have a much
larger luminance range and typically process video at 10 bits per color component rather
than at 8 bits. The larger luminance range and additional color data let HDR displays render
more discrete steps from the minimum to maximum brightness value in each color, creating
more realistic color transitions and revealing more detail in both shadows and highlights.
Compressor lets you view HDR video in the preview window on a supported display.
Devices that combine wide-gamut color with 10-bit HDR capability can produce vibrant
hues with nuanced shading, lending more realism and immediacy to an image, revealing
more detail, and reducing artifacts like gradient “banding” (often seen in images of the sky
as it transitions from lighter to darker areas.)
Several streaming content providers offer wide-color HDR video, including the iTunes Store,
Netflix, and Amazon Video. The Ultra HD Blu-ray disc format also supports wide-color HDR
video.
Wide-gamut color and HDR in Compressor
When you add a video file to Compressor for transcoding, the app identifies the source
video’s native color space (and displays an SDR or HDR badge in the Job inspector). After
you apply a transcode setting to the source file, you can modify that color space in the
file you output. Depending on the transcode setting you apply, Compressor offers several
common color space options—from standard gamut, to wide gamut, to wide-gamut HDR.
For details, see Change video color space in Compressor.
Transcoding a standard-gamut video to a wide-gamut color space won’t improve the
video’s appearance; the output video will look identical to the original because the wide-
gamut color space is a superset of the standard-gamut color space, and the colors won’t
be changed. Likewise, transcoding an 8-bit video to 10-bit HDR won’t change the video’s
appearance because Compressor can’t create additional resolution that wasn’t there to
begin with.