Luminous colors and extraordinary high quality are two terms that come to mind when thinking about High Dynamic Range. Now the two terms can be associated with Vimeo. HDR arrived!
Things are moving fast at Vimeo. Moving forward, filmmakers and editors who shoot or master their video in HDR can upload, host, watch, or sell their videos on Vimeo, and in the highest color accuracy possible. HDR is being enabled, including 10-bit graphics and a bt.2020 wide color gamut, by leveraging HEVC (meaning: all HDR videos are available to watch on the latest HDR-supported software and hardware, including the newly released iPhoneX, iPad Pro, and Apple TV 4k). According to a post by Sara Poorsattar, Director of Product, Video, on the company’s blog, Vimeo is the only video-hosting platform available in HDR on these platforms right now, something the company is proud of.
The introduction of HDR on Vimeo has four major features that are important to both filmmakers and the public: it offers over one billion colors, a wider color range, made for the human eye, allows resolutions up to 8K and means more visual data, smaller file sizes. This launch further supports Vimeo’sr goal of providing creators with powerful tools to host their videos in the highest quality possible.
Having more colors, wit this upgrade from 16 million colors to 1 billion colors, possible through the support of 10-bit video, means the image quality is strikingly clear and cleaner than ever before. Your viewers can now be truly enraptured in the gradient of a sunset, the subtlety of an ocean, and the emotion in a close-up that you worked so hard to capture— and not get distracted by color banding.
Support for wider color gamuts also contributes to what Vimeo now offers. Wide color gamusts /WCG) and BT.2020 (or Rec.2020) support allow images to represent over 75% of the color that the human eye can see. That’s a big change: most modern color gamuts in videos, writes Sara Poorsattar, “are limited to a 35% color range. But with BT.2020, we can truly depict your deepest reds, brightest greens, and darkest blacks like never before.”
Vimeo is taking things further, unlocking filmmakers 5K, 6K, and 8K videos “for your fans to watch on their Ultra High Def devices, or you can download them for file sharing.” Although 8K displays are not a main stream, yet, they are starting to hit the market, and from Vimeo’s point of view it makes sense to give its clients the option to sell and distribute 8K material they’ve shot.
Having 8K files means high columes of data, but Vimeo has a solution for that too: the company uses codecs — software to encode and decode video files — to optimize visual data, while delivering the highest quality. The company believes that “as we evolve our platform to display even more visual data, we now leverage HEVC/H.265 transcodes in addition to the H.264 set we currently use. This enables us to unlock next-generation features like HDR, and improve efficiency, so you can view a higher quality video with the same bandwidth.”
To read more about the introduction of HDR at Vimeo, follow the link.