A Complete Guide to HDR Grading with Dolby Vision

HDR grading refers to adjusting and enhancing video brilliance, contrast, and colour to take full advantage of HDR technologies such as Dolby Vision. These provide a wider colour gamut, and a broader range of brightness levels compared to standard video formats, offering an experience closer to how the human eye perceives light and colour.

The process starts with setting up an HDR-compatible workflow on DaVinci Resolve, including a 10-bit HDR display, proper colour space (Rec. 2100 PQ or HLG), and high-bit-depth footage. Using tools like waveform scopes and HDR colour wheels, our team adjusts brightness, contrast, and saturation to enhance details in highlights and shadows while preserving a natural look. Dolby Vision’s auto-tone mapping and highlight recovery help prevent clipping in bright areas, while colour space transforms (CST) convert SDR footage to HDR.

On Air is one of the few European production companies that uses Dolby Vision to enhance concert streams. One of the standout features of Vision is its ability to simplify the workflow for SDR deliverables. Dolby’s trim pass feature adjusts brightness and contrasts scene-by-scene or frame-by-frame, ensuring that highlights, shadows, and colours are optimised for each moment, maintaining the highest visual quality without overexposing details. Dolby also embeds dynamic metadata, allowing content to adapt to different screens and formats.

The key difference between HDR and SDR lies in the level of detail. HDR supports much higher brightness levels, reaching up to 10,000 nits in some formats, while SDR is typically around 100 nits, resulting in less contrast and detail in highlights and shadows. HDR also moves beyond a wider colour gamut (Rec. 2020) with 10-bit or 12-bit colour depth, displaying billions of colours, whereas SDR is restricted to Rec. 709 with an 8-bit depth, showing only 16.7 million colours.