Research

Meet SwitchHDR 2.0: 4K, 20 seconds, sharp in motion

TRY SWITCHHDR 2.0
Meet SwitchHDR 2.0: 4K, 20 seconds, sharp in motion

Introducing SwitchHDR 2.0

Dancing into the sunset: the hair, the dress and the footprints in the sand stay as they were shot. As the exposure steps down, the clipped sun in the SDR source on the left fades to a flat gray patch, while the SwitchHDR 2.0 sun on the right glows round behind her. Halfway through, the shot zooms in 3x on her hair against the sun.

SwitchHDR is our model for true HDR recovery: it rebuilds 16-bit scene radiance from ordinary 8-bit SDR footage, so blown highlights and crushed shadows hold up in the grade.

SwitchHDR 2.0 is a new architecture, built on the techniques behind SwitchX 2.0 and adapted for HDR recovery, with a result that stays locked to your source.

What's new in 2.0

  • Native 4K output, at 3840×2160.
  • Up to 480 frames, 20 seconds at 24fps, in a single job.
  • Sharp in motion, even when the movement is fast and busy.
  • Detail held from the source, so the texture of your footage survives the recovery.
  • More faithful color, so the HDR result grades like the source it came from.
SwitchHDR 1.0 vs 2.0. Resolution: 1920×1080 vs 3840×2160, four times the pixels. Shot length: 240 frames vs 480 frames, 10 vs 20 seconds at 24fps. Output color space: ACES2065-1 only vs ACES2065-1, ACEScg and linear Rec.709.

4K & 480 frames

SwitchHDR 2.0 renders natively in 4K, and one job covers up to 480 frames: 20 seconds at 24fps. The model reads the full-resolution source while it recovers, so fine structure comes from your footage, not from an upscaler.

Sunlight through stained glass, enlarged 16x. The same HDR result, downsampled to 720p on the left and native 4K on the right. Compare the face, the folds in the sleeve and the fine lines in the glass.

Sharp in motion

Fast movement comes through crisp, without smearing or ghosting. Try it on the shots that move: dance, sports and handheld footage.

Fire dancer at dusk, with the exposure stepping down from 0 to −4 EV. As the torch spins, the HDR flame keeps its shape and color from frame to frame, where the SDR shows a white blob.
Surfing into the sun, with the exposure stepping down from 0 to −4 EV. Through the moving water and the swaying camera, the HDR keeps a round sun and the sparkle on the waves, where the SDR sun and glare fade to gray.

Detail preservation

Recovery should only add what the SDR signal lost. SwitchHDR 2.0 keeps everything else as it was: fine texture, small text, motion blur. The output stays pixel-aligned with your source, so you can layer it over the original in the composite, and nothing drifts.

SDR source
SwitchHDR 2.0
Night drive in Hong Kong. The shot pushes in 4x on the GTS sign: the letter shapes and the date beneath them stay aligned with the source as the camera moves.

Faithful color

SwitchHDR 2.0 adds range without drifting your color. The red, green and blue channels keep the same balance as the source, so the shot drops into the grade you already had, without a correction pass.

Color balance holds through the recovery. Two color balance triangles side by side, one for the SDR source and one for SwitchHDR 2.0. Each corner is the red, green or blue channel's share of the shot's average brightness, and the two triangles have the same shape.

Ready for your pipeline

Choose the output color space when you generate: ACES2065-1 (AP0), ACEScg (AP1), or linear Rec.709. Every video render also comes with an HLG MOV, so you can review and share the result on any HDR display.

Everything from 1.0 carries over

Highlight and shadow thresholds still decide where the model recovers and where it leaves your footage alone: outside the mask, the source is kept pixel for pixel.

SDR source
SwitchHDR 2.0
Dusk on West 20th Street. At 0 EV the two sides match. As the exposure steps down, the clipped SDR sky turns flat gray, while the HDR brings back the clouds behind the buildings.

Put SwitchHDR 2.0 to work

SwitchHDR 2.0 is available to everyone in the Beeble cloud app, on the SDR to HDR page and as a node in the canvas. 4K output is part of the Professional plan.

TRY SWITCHHDR 2.0