SDR to HDR (High Dynamic Range) Converter?

Question

I've heard that it's possible to convert SDR videos to HDR and get reasonable results. Obviously, this isn't as good as having source HDR content, but I'm really curious and would like to try this for myself. I have lots of 10 bpc 422 SDR video, and I'm wondering if there's any software out there that could automatically convert it into an HDR format that gives good results. Is there such software?

For example, I've attempted to use Premiere Pro CC 2019 (using the High10 profile with Dynamic Range checked) to do convert input SDR video to HDR, but the colors in the output HDR video all end up extremely dark looking (an undesirable result). I'm just wondering if there's software that can give me much better results with little effort on my part.

Answer 1

I'd suspect anything purely automated is going to be pretty marginal. There's a lot of complexity to getting a good curve with the right gamma, but there's a variety of possible levels of what would be considered "good results". Personally, I'd rather try getting a good mapping manually with something like Resolve and then trying to see what scenes I could copy the curve to. I'd suspect that minimal effort and reasonable competence would result in a better quality end result than most automated tools. That's true for most Auto Tone, Auto Level and Auto Curve tools for standard dynamic range, so I'm not sure why it would be different for HDR.