[Google Pixel 7] knosso:
Hi everybody,

I'm opening this discussion and when looking in XDA I was 100% sure I would find someone else already asking the same question, but I didn't. This means eighter I looked in the wrong place or that there is something very basic that I am not understanding about HDR. Hopefully some of you have been through this and found some solutions that I'm not seing at the moment. In the immediate future I will not shoot in HDR unless I find new ways of handling this format, In the meantime I do have some videos in HDR that I would like to rescue.

I shoot some videos in HDR 10bit (HLG format according to the info I found online) and this is what I am experiencing:

The videos on the same phone that took them look less true to life compared to the SDR counterpart.

Colors are oversaturated farther from the real color of the objets in low contract situations while they look washed out in high contrast situations.

Shadows look darker that what they really are and highlights look overly bright almost as if they are emitting light rather than reflecting it.

The videos when shared on a social platform (Watsapp, Telegram) look brutally overexposed to the point where you almost cannot see anyhting.

The videos are unplayable in the same app (google photo) in another relatively new device (Samsung Tab S8).

The videos, when watched on a windows computer with the OS set to non-HDR 8/10bit and the screen screen set to Rec.709 with the latest version of VLC, exacerbate the sensation of shadows to dark and highlight too bright with overall washed out colors and exagerated contrast.

The videos, when watched on the same identical windows computer but with the OS set to HDR 10bit (confirmed in the display OSD) and the picture settings on the screen set to standard, look very similar to the ones shared from the phone to a social app: extremely overexposed to the point of not seing any details at all. When setting the display settings of the display OSD to custom and lowered the contrast a lot I could see that there is indeed information and color in the burned out part of the image but by that point every other window on the screen just looks "faded" and even then the colors of the video, expecially hightlights, look like "watercolours".

I tried converting the HDR videos to various colour profiles with Handbrake, both keeping the 10bit and lowering to 8 bit.

Conversion to BT.709/BT.601-EBU/BT.601-SMPTE-C at 8/10bit while keeping the monitor in HDR 10bit: the various conversions look surprisingly similar to each other and look more pleasing than the original HDR video but still the feeling is that something is off.

Conversion to BT.2020 10bit while keeping the display in 10bit HDR: the video just looks dull.

Conversion to BT.2020 8bit while keeping the display in 10bit HDR: it looks similar to the HDR video but with slightly different highlights and shadows.

Conversion to 8bit without changing the colour space: looks exactly the same except that there seems to be less details in shadows and highlights.

When setting the display to 8/10bit non-HDR all of the conversions described above look pretty much the identical to each other with BT.2020 having a slightly different hue of the sky more torwards violet. All of them look better than the original HDR video with the 10bit videos looking ever so slightly better than the 8bit ones. The image looks less contrasty and the colours are more visible but they still look a bit watercoloury. The HDR video converted to 8bit without altering the color space looks identical to the 10bit one but with a little bit less details in shadows and highlights.

From time to time the converted videos play as if someone cranked the saturation slider all the way up and to go back to more "normal" colours I have to click on a couple of other videos and then come back to the video of interest.

Questions:

How is it possible to watch these HDR videos in a proper, consistent, reliable, with true to life colours, in a pleasing manner on various devices?

How can I share a video shot in HDR to make sure that it doesn't look overexposed on a social media?

How can I transform the HDR videos to a color space that is more compatible and more reliable so that I am sure about what the person in front of the screen is seeing? Handbrake seems to do a good job but the videos still don't quite look right. So either that is the best possible conversion because HDR videos are fundamentally broken or there might be something else worth exploring.

Sorry for the extra long post. I had an idea of HDR completely different from what it turned out to be in the Pixel 7. HDR pictures are still pretty much 8bit but they are a stack of images to recover highlights and shadows in a proper way and they look amazing. 10bit Cinelike and Log footage that I used is still pretty much SDR and is quite usable and easy to push and pull to make it look a lot better than an "out of the box 8bit SDR" footage and often there are options like "Native HDR" or "dual ISO" that don't change the colour space that you are watching the video in, but recover quite a lot of shadows and highlights.