Unified HDR Reference White

What is the problem & the opportunity?

Well established workflows exist from production through packaging, presentation to final content distribution. Each discipline in the chain has come to rely upon tried, tested, and above all, unified standards. Standards that are well understood, work together and that allow for free interchange of content at each juncture without technical issue and the fear of unknowns.

The advent of HDR and Wide Color Gamut technologies means change to custom and practice. New workflow rules must be established and honed. The problem is that in this early adoption phase, competing standards are anything but unified. This present the industry an opportunity to establish an agreed upon commonality between the current incompatible array of standards and self interest.

The solution to harmonious, technically correct and agile content production through to distribution is proposed here in the form of an HDR Reference White standard.

Please read on… Continue reading “Unified HDR Reference White”

VideoQ VQMA Software Video Analyzer – Check Your Cow before Checking Milk

What good farmer should check first – cow health or milk quality?
The answer is pretty clear – only healthy cow can produce good milk.

Thus, mapping this approach to video content production, only healthy video processors and properly configured processing workflow can produce high quality content.

Unfortunately, this simple idea is often ignored and people assume that all  “cows” are healthy by default.

VideoQ VQMA is a software tool allowing to check your video workflow before the arrival of unpleasant messages like “by some unclear reasons, the quality of your content dropped down”. Continue reading “VideoQ VQMA Software Video Analyzer – Check Your Cow before Checking Milk”

Color Bars – Reference Levels

Color Bars is the most used Test Pattern.

At first it was defined in analog RGB signal format, then in composite NTSC/PAL/SECAM formats, then in analog component format (YPbPr aka YUV), and finally – in digital component RGB and YUV formats.

In accordance with ITU-R Recommendation BT.471 the nomenclature (type specification) of any color bars test pattern should consist of RGB levels as a percentage of Reference White in the following sequence:
White Bar / Black Bar / Max Colored Bars / Min Colored Bars.

For 100/0/75/0 “EBU Bars” the MathCAD RGB_Bars matrix in percents looks like this: Continue reading “Color Bars – Reference Levels”