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(Beaverton, Oregon - April 25, 2018) isovideo announces the launch of their Game-ChangerAward-Winning Viarte cluster-based on-the-fly, HDR/HLG/SDR HD/UHD/4K content conversion self-service, with steep cost and time savings. This service is a unique pilot program, and the first to bridge a couple of goals important to the media and entertainment industry.

The industry has been pushing for HDR main stream adoption, but despite tremendous effort and progress achieved, market penetration still has only been very gradual. Since five dominant HDR standards (HLG, HDR10, HDR10+, Technicolor's advanced HDR and Dolby vision) currently co-exist, aside from their respective merits, this situation simply fragments and confuses the market, as well as burdening HDR production costs. Other subtle issues are related to HDR/SDR conversion quality. As SDR is the dominant distribution format for the foreseeable future, its quality should be of utmost importance. HDR production should not only achieve future-proof production, with minor distribution goals to begin with, it should also give much better SDR to justify its cost while benefitting viewership at large. Unfortunately, the backward-compatible version of SDR from HLG, or LUT based SDR from HDR only achieve degraded SDR, which could negatively impact viewership. High quality, low cost, automated conversion to SDR from HDR has always been a technical challenge. After years of research and development, isovideo brings their unparalleled quality HDR to SDR+ tone mapping to the market as a major feature of its new Viarte self-service, immediately available. SDR+ offers uncompromised immersive viewing experience on any SDR display with much improved detail, including shadows, contrast, highlights and color. It is universally distributable using existing SDR infrastructure, including dual format OTT and Bluray, and is also a good alternative for SDR broadcast during the HDR transition period.

Other Key Features and Advantages of Viarte Self Services include:

  • HDR to SDR global tone mapping allows the preservation of HDR creative intent, by keeping optimum detail throughout, with minimum bright color saturation, while complying with Rec709. No input metadata is required. It is easy to use, and configurable to suit a wide range of preferences.
  • SDR to HDR/HLG up-conversion and color-grading achieves enhanced sharpness, color and local contrast, as well as a substantial boost in specular highlights and shadow details, while also preserving SDR creative intent and correctly maintaining hue. Achieving these goals presented many subtle technical difficulties not easily solved, yet they are critically important for immersive viewing.
  • SDR/HDR conversion works with Viarte cinema-quality pipelined standard conversion, including MC frame rate conversion, MC deinterlacing, scaling, noise reduction, etc. Legacy content can be most efficiently and cost effectively processed to breathe new life into it, and attract savvy viewers.
  • Customer data is 100% securely handled. All data is automatically encrypted in transit, on arrival and before streaming out. This is strictly implemented in Viarte cluster services to ensure maximum data security at all times.
  • On-the-fly, streamable automated conversion and transport significantly increases workflow efficiency, allowing conversion results to be immediately and simultaneously streamed out to multiple destinations for faster downstream workflow processing.
  • With prior elective setup for input and output streaming, no trace of customer data remains on the system after conversion is completed. Streaming delay from input to output is low over a network (typically in seconds), allowing fast delivery and review of results.
  • Multi-level priority queues allow processing trade-off between cost, time, and convenience to satisfy all needs and preferences.

isovideo CTO Keith Slavin said: "HDR production can take off if its visual benefits can be immediately appreciated by everyone. HDR camera capture with our automated tone mapping to SDR+ can really help with this transition. Automated SDR to HDR up-conversion can help bring any type of SDR content to immersive HDR displays, including legacy and live sources. Viarte self-service helps bring down technology and cost barriers, and accelerate HDR adoption."

Special Post-NAB Promotion:

Telycam MixOne / ExploreXE — NAB 2026
isovideo will be offering 100 free film HDR/HLG/SDR HD/UHD conversions in May, 2018, on a first-come first served basis. Conversion types include:
  • Original mastered in HD/UHD, HDR10/DCI-P3 to SDR rec709
  • Original mastered in HD/UHD, HLG/BT2020 to SDR rec709
  • Original mastered in HD/UHD, SDR rec709 to HDR10/DCI-P3 or HLG/BT2020

This promotion is limited to two films per organization, where each film is of a different conversion type.

For more details about this promotion, please contact isovideo at info@isovideo.com. For more information about isovideo, please visit: isovideo, and follow us on Twitter andYoutube.