Capture very bright light and deep shadows together, so sunlight, neon, and flames look dazzlingly real on HDR-capable screens.
Dolby Vision content in theaters and streaming, YouTube videos shot on the latest smartphones, and landscape, night-view, and car ads. The bigger the brightness difference in a scene, the bigger the difference HDR makes.
First check whether the clip you received is SDR or HDR. With ffprobe, it is SDR if color_transfer is bt709, and HDR if it is smpte2084 (PQ) or arib-std-b67 (HLG). An 8-bit SDR clip has little brightness information, so forcing it into HDR easily causes banding. That is why finishing in SDR is safer in most cases. If you really need HDR, use Topaz Video AI's SDR to HDR conversion or a generation tool that outputs HDR, and grade in DaVinci Resolve while watching on an HDR monitor. Export at 10-bit or higher, with the Rec. 2020 color space and PQ or HLG information. YouTube only processes it as HDR when this information is present, and it recommends the HEVC, VP9, and AV1 codecs. On screens that don't support HDR it is converted to SDR for display, so check how it looks in SDR too.
Convert an HDR phone clip to SDR BT.709 before mixing it with AI clips, otherwise colors look washed out: ffmpeg -i hdr.mp4 -vf "zscale=t=linear:npl=100,format=gbrpf32le,zscale=p=bt709,tonemap=tonemap=hable:desat=0,zscale=t=bt709:m=bt709:r=tv,format=yuv420p" -c:v libx264 -crf 17 -c:a copy out.mp4
Tomorrowland (2015) — The first film released in theaters in Dolby Vision format
Comfy Compositing — HDR AI Video Finally Works in a VFX Pipeline — LTX 2.3 HDR EXR Workflow