About HDR

Recently, we’ve been researching new video techniques and technologies, which led us to discover this video where two Canon 5D Mark II cameras were used in order to capture a video in HDR, or High Dynamic Range.

High Dynamic Range refers to an image with a greater range of luminance between light and dark areas of the photo. This allows the light and dark areas to be represented equally well, instead of having to choose between seeing light areas but having under exposed dark areas, or seeing dark areas but having over exposed light areas.

This effect is typically done with still photography by taking multiple pictures of the same image, but at varied exposures. These images are then uploaded into a program that can perform a tone mapping operation to merge the images together.  Depending on the settings chosen, the effect can vary from that of a high contrast, high saturation image to a more surreal image that resembles a very detailed drawing or computer rendering.

HDR Photograph at Saint Vincent College

An online search for HDR photography also provides numerous examples of these types of images.

HDR Videography

HDR videography is a fairly new concept which has many more challenges than HDR photography.  While in still photography it is simple to place a camera on a tripod and adjust the exposure settings between shots (this is made even simpler if your camera has exposure bracketing settings), in the extreme majority of situations you can not simply reshoot a video with different exposure settings and have the two shots be identical.

In the video example above they used two Canon 5D Mark II cameras and a beam splitter to simultaneously film each shot in two different exposures.  The beam splitter splits the light reflecting off the subject into two separate beams, which then go to each camera.  Each camera is then set at a different exposure.  The two images are then composited together and processed with special software.

Not everyone can afford two HD quality cameras though, and building a perfectly aligned beam splitting mount would be an extremely daunting task for most individuals, so many have opted to find ways to achieve this effect using post processing on a single source video.  While this isn’t true HDR – true cameras with extended dynamic range are still under development and the technology cannot be produced affordably yet – it gives a similar “look” to your footage. There are tutorials for this for Adobe AfterEffects and for time lapse videos in Photoshop, but none that we are aware of for Final Cut Pro, so we decided to create one ourselves.

Tutorial

Here is our tutorial for creating a HDR style effect in Final Cut Pro with Magic Bullet Looks.  Again, this is not actual HDR, but an effect to simulate the appearance.