SDR to HDR: questions and answers

A 10-bit H.265 HDR10 MP4. It carries BT.2020 primaries and the SMPTE ST 2084 PQ transfer curve, which is what makes a file HDR10 rather than an SDR file with a bright look. Resolution and frame rate come back exactly as you uploaded them.

No. A 1080p30 clip returns as 1080p30 and a 4K60 clip as 4K60. The engine remaps luminance and colour only. Nothing is upscaled, interpolated, cropped or re-timed, so the result drops into an existing timeline without conforming.

No. This does one operation: SDR to HDR10. It is not an upscaler, a denoiser, a frame interpolator or a general enhancement suite. If you need those, they are separate jobs and separate tools, and running them before conversion usually works better than after.

No, ever. There is no free tier and no trial output to protect, so there is nothing to watermark. What you download is the deliverable.

Range that was compressed, not range that was clipped. Highlights squeezed against SDR's diffuse-white ceiling get room to separate. A window already blown out to flat white in the source has no detail to restore, and no process recovers what the sensor never recorded.

MP4, MOV or WebM, up to 60 seconds and 500 MB. Longer clips are not supported yet, so trim to the section that matters before uploading. The 60-second limit covers most short-form, highlight and product footage without cutting.

Read the file rather than the device. Run ffprobe and check the colour transfer field: smpte2084 or arib-std-b67 means the clip is already HDR, and bt709 or an empty field means it is SDR. An iPhone 12 or newer usually records HDR by default.

Not directly, and it will disappoint you. S-Log, V-Log, C-Log and D-Log are flat curves holding sensor range for grading, not finished pictures. Grade the footage or apply the manufacturer's LUT first, then convert the graded export.

They convert, but they gain the least. Interfaces and slides are authored for SDR displays, so there are no specular highlights or bright surfaces for the extra range to hold. The usual problem with screen recordings is chroma subsampling around text, which HDR does not address.

Yes, and the output is genuinely 10-bit. The extra levels stop the conversion introducing new banding as the highlight range stretches. Banding already visible in the 8-bit source stays, because the values between those bands were never recorded.

$6.00 per 10 seconds at 1080p and below, $12.75 per 10 seconds above 1080p. The minimum charge is $0.60 per conversion. You are billed per second of source video, so a 7-second clip costs less than a 10-second one.

No. Top up any amount from $50 and convert at the standard rate for as long as the balance lasts. Plans exist only to lower the per-second rate for people converting regularly, not to gate access to anything.

The per-second rate, and nothing else. HDR-20, HDR-50 and HDR-200 grant $20, $50 and $200 of balance each month at $20, $50 and $200. HDR-50 cuts the rate by 8% and HDR-200 by 20%. Output quality and limits are identical on every plan.

Top-up balance never expires. Subscription balance resets to the plan amount on each renewal rather than accumulating, so an unused month does not roll forward. Spending draws on subscription balance first, then top-up.

You are refunded automatically and emailed. The full charge returns to your balance, usually within minutes. Jobs that stall are checked against the render queue before any refund, so a slow job is never refunded out from under a conversion that then succeeds.

Yes. Prices shown include any applicable VAT or sales tax. Payments are processed by Polar.sh as merchant of record, which handles tax collection and remittance and issues the invoice.

Any HDR10-capable screen: current HDR televisions, iPhone 12 and later, iPad Pro, MacBook Pro XDR displays, and YouTube, which detects the HDR10 stream and serves it automatically to capable devices. HEVC hardware decoding is near-universal on hardware from the last several years.

Almost always the player, not the file. Software that does not recognise the PQ curve reads its code values as ordinary gamma: blacks lift toward grey and colour drains. Check the file's own metadata, or play it on a display that reports HDR support, before re-exporting anything.

Run ffprobe on the file and check three fields. A real HDR10 file reports color_transfer=smpte2084, color_primaries=bt2020, and a 10-bit pixel format such as yuv420p10le. Anything reporting bt709 in the transfer field is SDR whatever it is called.

HDR10 is royalty-free, so every HDR display supports it without a licence or a fallback stream. Dolby Vision carries per-frame metadata and can look better where it is supported, but its playback path is narrower. For a file that has to play anywhere, HDR10 is the format that needs no exceptions.

Not from here, but it is straightforward to do yourself. It requires tone mapping rather than a straight re-tag, which is why naive conversions come out washed out. The HDR to SDR guide covers three working methods, including one that runs on ffmpeg builds without zscale.

Yes. Uploads and outputs live in a bucket with no public domain at all, reachable only by signed URL, and every URL we issue is short-lived. Nothing you upload is served from a public address, and there is no unsigned path to it.

Seven days, then uploads and outputs are deleted automatically by a scheduled cleanup. Download what you need before then. Retention is a fixed window rather than an account setting, so there is nothing to configure and nothing to forget.

No. Your uploads are used to produce your conversion and nothing else. They are not used for training, not shared with third parties, and not retained past the seven-day window described above.