 Cameras, lights, fancy calibrated monitors. What is the point of any of this? YouTube has supported 4K high dynamic range or HDR video for years. And yet this so-called next big thing is conspicuously absent from the content of even the geekiest creators. No offense. Sorry, nothing personal. I know you know it's true. And I know this question has been eating away at you. Why? I mean, many of you are carrying an HDR display around in your pocket. Surely you'd like to use it. So is it laziness, incompetence, both? I don't know. Because the problem actually isn't on the creator side. It's with YouTube. The truth is that getting that little HDR selector to show up, that's the easy part. Delivering a consistent viewing experience. Well, that's extremely hard right now because of platform limitations that have existed for years now. And I say enough is enough. It's time for YouTube to stop half-baking features that actually elevate the viewing experience and take these problems seriously. You know what else we take seriously? Segways to our sponsors. iFixit, need a diverse toolkit? iFixit has just the right thing for you. Learn more about the Manta toolkit and its 112 steel bits with two premium drivers at the end of the video. (*upbeat music*) HDR hasn't proven to be the kind of tech buzzword that really drives people to upgrade. But when they finally experience it done well, most do agree that it looks more lifelike and immersive. This is thanks to both its wider color gamut and its ability to retain detail in both the brightest and the darkest portions of the scene. Now, HDR recording is all around us with popular devices boasting the capability for years now. But in spite of this, most videos on YouTube are uploaded in standard dynamic range or SDR, which has a much narrower range of colors to sample from and tends to look flat or more lifeless by comparison. Obvious fix then, right? Let's all just upload our videos in HDR so they'll be more gooder. Well, yeah, we thought of that obviously. But every time we revisit this conversation internally, we run into YouTube platform problems that have made our efforts discouraging to say the least. To fully understand them though, we're gonna need to dive into how HDR content gets from the sets of your favorite shows to your eye holes. By the way, if your eye holes are starved for some more entertainment, check out our Float Plane exclusive video on the biggest data hoarders at LMG. You won't wanna miss it. First of all, not all content benefits from HDR. So lighting, wardrobe and set design play a major part in the overall experience. Then there's your camera. Anything from your iPhone to a cinema camera costing tens of thousands of dollars can capture HDR video, but not all is created equal. To explain, we need to actually define the dynamic range part of high dynamic range. For a camera sensor, the dynamic range is the number of increments or stops that it's rated for. Each stop up is double the amount of light and vice versa. In a nutshell then, the more stops the sensor can see at a time, the higher the dynamic range and top tier cinema cameras can do 14 or more before they start to lose details in the darkest or the brightest parts of the scene. When it comes to the content that we consume however, HDR also comes with the expectation of a wider color gamut and well mastered HDR content should take advantage of both of these elements. Not to end up with an even worse version of the vivid mode in a Best Buy showroom, but to get a more natural appearance. To achieve this, a colorist will use specialized software and an ungodly expensive HDR mastering display to fine tune details in a video, like the texture of plants, the lines on a person's face, or the different shades of blue in the sky, making them appear more true to life. But we've got a problem. The professional grade display that that colorist is working on is undoubtedly much nicer than anything you loan in the next probably five to 10 years. So how do we translate what they're working on to your experience at home? Well, that's where all of these competing HDR formats come in. Whether you're talking about HDR 10, HDR 10 plus, Dolby Vision, HLG, or any of the others, all of them exist to solve the same fundamental challenge of somehow delivering a consistent viewing experience across displays that have vastly different capabilities. Thankfully, we do have a solution, tone mapping metadata. Metadata is best defined as data that accompanies other data, providing helpful information about it. And oh, you also want to know about tone mapping. Ah, now that is a way of mathematically scaling the brightness and the color values of the content to match your current display. It's super cool. And without it, this shot from the HDR channel looking toward the sun would turn into a massive stain of white light on anything but a $30,000 reference monitor. So then back to YouTube. The SDR content on the platform is also accompanied by all sorts of metadata. This includes information about the video and audio codex, the creation date, et cetera. What it doesn't include is any brightness or color information. SDR devices expect this metadata to be encoded directly into the video file. Well, that would be a big problem if they clicked on an HDR upload where the metadata is stored separately from the video file. While HDR video can be played back by an SDR device, it's gonna end up looking a little something like this. And given that the majority of viewers on YouTube are still likely watching on an SDR device, that would be an unacceptable compromise. But don't worry, they do have a better one. It's called a LUT or a lookup table. LUTs are essentially data files that are applied onto videos that transform the existing color values with their own color grade. For you Zoomers out there, you could think of them kind of like Instagram filters. They're not quite the same as tone mapping, which translates the entire color space. But YouTube's one size fits all LUT application looks all right enough that Joe average with his TN monitor isn't gonna complain when they're watching your HDR video in its auto-generated SDR. However, because it's not tailored to your exact video, I can pretty much guarantee that the colors are not going to come out the way that you intended, yielding dull, lifeless results. And it's bad enough that the HDR channel actually includes a disclaimer in their video descriptions warning that if their video looks pretty crap, it's probably because YouTube ruined it. You know what doesn't look crappy? Our LTT beanie in seven gorgeous colors available at lttstore.com. Now you can upload your own LUT file alongside the video with customized values, but the process by which you go about applying the LUT is convoluted at best involving stumbling across Google's help page on uploading HDR videos, which then directs you to a GitHub page where you download a tool and fiddle around with the command prompt in order to apply the custom LUT to your video. Even then, the tool itself is antiquated as it was originally intended just to flag a video as HDR so that YouTube would know what you were uploading since flagging content for HDR metadata wasn't easy six years ago. Nowadays though, software like Premiere Pro can export a video with the requisite HDR metadata that YouTube needs to identify the video as HDR. It's just that YouTube isn't using all of the provided metadata. Like supposedly YouTube supports HDR 10 plus, which is great because it's an open standard for dynamic metadata, which provides enough info for tone mapping on a scene by scene basis rather than just applying one tone map for the entire video. But neither we nor the gentleman who runs the HDR channel have been able to get the HDR 10 plus to work. So we've all given up on that. The tool does however, still give you an attempt at an SDR conversion by embedding your own LUT like separate from YouTube standard one. But this is with dynamic metadata limitations and the loss of detail for bright areas in a bright scene for example. Another solution could be letting you upload both an SDR and an HDR grade of your video. Something that Prime video by contrast does give you the option of doing. But I can't exactly easily migrate my business to Prime since in addition to obvious reasons, it's geared toward professional filmmakers and distributors. And before you even begin to upload anything, you've got to jump through hoops like adding your bank account, tax info. And if you read deep enough in the fine print, probably a pledge to donate a kidney in the event daddy Bezos needs it. All of which means that I need YouTube to care enough to make this process manageable for independent creators and to know that they should care. We know from our audience data that about half of our viewers are on mobile with roughly half of those running Android 10 or newer, which by our rough napkin calculations means that at least a third of you right now are on an HDR capable screen, at least on your phone. Even then there are some hiccups though. On Android, there's still no user brightness control alongside HDR. So HDR videos will just blast your eyes with maximum brightness, not that great at night. And according to the most recent Steam hardware survey, over 80% of you are running at 1080p or less on your computers, which are almost certainly not HDR. And of the remaining 20%, very few will have shelled out for an HDR capable model with fewer still spending the thousand plus on a quality HDR display that will truly give you a better viewing experience. But the question there is, why would you shell out the extra? It's not like your favorite content creators are uploading an HDR or anything. So I guess that's the point of this video. I just wanted you to know that it's not because I don't want to. And I wanted to finally get this out of my system because it might sound harsh, but YouTube has been kind of like a disappointing child for me lately. I can't control it. All I can do is sit it down and talk about how deep down it knows it's capable of living up to its untapped potential, but only if it applies itself, you know? So hopefully this rant reaches someone over there who cares enough to make a change. Oh, and I hope it also reaches our sponsor. iFixit. Father's Day is quickly approaching, which I love. And iFixit has gifts for dads at all price points. If you're looking for the ultimate gift, check out iFixit's Manta Kit. It comes complete with 112 steel bits with everything from standard bits like Phillips and Flathead to more niche bits like Torx, TriPoint and GameBits as well. iFixit's Manta Kit includes not one, but two aluminum screwdriver handles with a hefty quarter inch drive for full size applications and a smaller four millimeter one for precision work. Both drivers feature magnetic bit sockets, knurled grips and silky smooth spinning tops. You can just nestle them in your palm. Plus the tool kit's lid doubles as a sorting tray for added convenience and that's magnetic too. Work confidently knowing all iFixit tools are backed by a lifetime warranty and check out iFixit's gifts for dads using the link below. If you guys enjoyed this video and you wanna learn more about the inner workings of HDR, check out our video, HDR standards explained. HDR10, Dolby Vision, HLG over on Techquickie. And be sure to let us know what you think about YouTube's implementation of HDR. And if you're a content creator yourself, we'd love to hear about any problems you've experienced down in the comments.