4K HDR Spider-Man Videocast Early Access (Patreon)

Hello! Rich here, with a very quick update. I really hope you enjoyed John's deep dive into Marvel's Spider-Man, published on Tuesday. A lot of love and effort went into that work and I'm just blown away by the comprehensiveness and quality there. In those 31 minutes you're seeing the results of around a week of John's life!

I'd been playing the game a little bit on the side and decided with John that in the wake of the video, we'd record a videocast - and I came up with the idea of replaying from scratch and capturing everything in HDR. That video is released early for Patreon supporters today and you can grab it right here:

https://www.digitalfoundry.net/2018-09-06-df-videocast-17-spider-man-ps4-in-4k-hdr

The final video is 35 minutes in total, based on around 2.2TB of 4K HDR ProRes capture (raw capture was around four hours in total) spread across four SSDs. The edit was carried out in Adobe Premiere Pro, which still doesn't have comprehensive HDR support - we just retain 10-bit workflow throughout and export, encode to HEVC, then tweak MP4 metadata to tell your player (and YouTube) that it's an HDR file. Previewing is challenging while we work as everything is greyed out somewhat, but it works in the end.

One of the biggest challenges is conforming SDR assets to look good in HDR. A bit of the hat to friend of Digital Foundry Matt Falconer, a professional colourist who helped us out immensely in getting this right when we first looked into HDR video. We have a LUT added to SDR assets (such as name tags, text labels and SDR footage) that accurately maps them into HDR space. We then give these assets a slight exposure tweak to brighten them up a bit otherwise things look rather dull. I've got to admit, I'm rather surprised at how well the SDR footage holds up (there's some PC Arkham Knight around 28 minutes in and of course the E3 2017 demo footage also gets the same treatment).

HDR adds a lot more processing to the timeline but even though only a few people actually get to see the final asset the way it's meant to be seen on YouTube, I do feel it's worth doing! In the here and now, we're still waiting for YouTube to resolve the 4K encode (13 hours and counting) but 1080p60 looks OK for preview purposes - while Patreon supporters can of course download the full thing. It should look great on a proper HDR screen.

Any way, I hope you enjoy that! And one more thing - I've also uploaded John's raw capture of the Rage 2 E3 demo. It's a bit short on content and 1080p60 only but it's worth a look. It *is* raw capture though, and in some of the shots you can see John's 'process' in getting some panoramic cutaways. As always, our Patreon exclusive uploads can be found here: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/browse/patreon-exclusive

Thanks - as always - for your continued support!