What if you could view HDR on any TV set or monitor eliminating the need to buy expensive HDR monitors?
What if you could plot any video’s color space in real time and overlay it on the CIE1931 Chromaticity diagram?
What if you could overlay caption and safe area grids over any aspect ratio?
What if you could play back the most challenging IMF and JPEG2000 coding schemes up to lossless BCP Level 7 on even less powerful hardware that you ever thought possible?
I don’t like to brag (usually) but Iris™ 3.0 is one killer release… and as always, it’s free to our hundreds of Iris users on active support. Yes, turn any television or monitor into an HDR set. Iris is the world’s only multi-format, broadcast quality media player that supports the up-conversion of SDR content to HDR so that you can make the best use of your current equipment. Using complex algorithms the Iris player interprets the richer, deeper colors and higher contrast of HDR media content, and shows it on any computer monitor or television. You won’t need to buy HDR equipment to see HDR content, but if you do have an HDR set, the Iris player will make SDR content look even more rich and colorful, taking advantage of the full gamut of colors and brightness. You can even watch SDR and HDR side-by-side in a split-screen image. Now that Iris supports the accurate playback of any combination of HDR and SDR media files and television sets, you can grow your operation and adoption of HDR without spending a lot of money.
So how do you measure this new color space? How do you know it fits into BT.2020 or any of the others? Now that color spaces are a reality in professional video work, Iris introduces the new Spectrascope™ tool to plot any video file’s color space on the CIE1931 Chromaticity diagram. Spectrascope internally converts all color formats to YCbCr>RGB>XYZ>xyY and dynamically shows where pixels are in BT.709, BT.2020, BT.601, RGB and DCI-P3 color spaces. For the first time, you can really see and understand the color spectrum and how it fits into all the various color spaces… in real time.
How do you know if your captions are located correctly? Iris extends its support for captions and subtitles with grid overlays for CEA608/708 and STL, accurately indicating their locations in the specified picture area. The overlays are also extended with safe area markers for any aspect ratio, user-adjustable from 50% to 100%. Iris can now search within captions and subtitles, and export them to CSV.
How can you watch media encoded in lossless BCP Level 7? Until now, it’s been really difficult. JPEG2000 and IMF’s most challenging flavor is called lossless BCP Level 7, used for the highest quality masters and archives. Watching it can require hardware approaching the limits of servers and personal computers. Iris 3.0 has made a breakthrough in JPEG2000 software decoding and can now provide a stable viewing experience at visually lossless quality. The latest IMF formats support Complex CPL’s where playback is directed by XML markers, and these are shown on the Iris timeline with jump-to shortcuts. IMF is coming fast. Every facility must be able to cope with it soon. We can help.
And, as with every new Iris release, there’s support for even more formats. More DNxHD definitions, audio files with extensions .ac3, .ec3, .aac, and AVC-Intra MXF Omneon/MOG in “open/incomplete” format (created by recording live feeds).
As you can see, this is one killer release. For our Iris users, we welcome you to download it, use it and give us any feedback or suggestions you may have. (Licenseholders please note – Iris 3.0 needs a license refresh so write to support@graymeta.com.) For those of you who are not Iris users, it’s time to get on board. Iris is now the most popular and pervasive reference video playback tool in the world.