Sooo... there's a whole story here of interacting forces, technology advancements, etc...

I've recently dipped a toe into this space because I got myself a camera that can shoot 8K HDR "raw" footage with 12-bit color. As I learned to edit and process this into something I can upload to YouTube I got a glimpse into the madness that's going on in the industry.

Basically, digital cameras got really good really quickly, and at the same time OLED monitors and super-bright LCDs with local dimming become available for mere mortals.

The industry meanwhile was stuck in the mindset that there is only one standard, and it is basically "whatever the RGB phosphors of a CRT TV made in the 1980s did". The software, the hardware, the entire pipeline revolved around some very old assumptions that were all violated by advancing technology. The changes were so rapid that mistakes are still common.

Essentially, video editing tools had to "grow up" and deal with color management properly, but there was an awful lot of push-back from both the editors/colorists, and the vendors themselves.

Examples:

- Professional grading monitors have buttons on the side to emulate various color spaces. These buttons generally don't "report back" the active color space to the OS or the grading software. It's possible to complete an entire project and not notice that what you see on your setup is not at all what anyone else will see. ("Oops.")

- Some OLED grading monitors are so good now that in a dark room you won't notice that you've accidentally packed the brightness range into the bottom 10% of the signal range. (This is basically what happened with that episode of Game of Thrones.)

- Both recording devices and color grading software like DaVinci Resolve treats color "artistically" and are basically incapable of the equivalent of "strong typing". Video from the camera is often not tagged with the color space used, which is just crazy to me, but this is the "way things are done"! Similarly, these tools generally don't have a strict mapping into the working space, they allow overrides and it's all very flexible and squishy.

- Colorists are so used to the specifics of old formats that they think in terms of RGB values in the encoded output space. Same as Photoshop users who think in terms of 255,127,0 being a specific color instead of a specific encoding. ("In what space!?") This extends to tooling like Resolve that shows the output-space values instead of the actual color space in all controls.

- Video cards and monitors "do their own thing". Without closing the loop with a hardware calibrator, there is absolutely no way to know what you're actually seeing is what others will see.

- The software has a mind of its own too. It's absurdly difficult to avoid "black crush" especially. It just happens. Forums are full of people basically fiddling with every combination of checkboxes and drop-down options until it "goes away"... on their specific monitor and driver setup. Then it looks too bright on YouTube... but not NetFlix. Or whatever.

- Basic assumptions one might have about HDR editing are still mired in the SDR world. E.g.: I would expect a fade-out to be equivalent to turning down exposure of the camera. It isn't! Instead it's the equivalent of blending the output tone mapped image with black, so bright parts of the scene turn grey instead of less bright.

For reference, outside of the video editing space, tools like Adobe Lightroom (for stills photo editing) are much more strict and consistent in the way they work. RAW stills photos are always tagged with the input gamut and color space, are automatically mapped to a very wide gamut that won't "clip" during editing, and all editing controls operate in this ultra-HDR space. It's only the final output step that tone maps into the target HDR or SDR space.

As a random example of this, switching from SDR to HDR mode in Lightroom will just make the highlights get brighter and more colorful. In DaVinci Resolve, unpredictable brightness shifts will occur throughout the image.

sRGB Gamut Clipping (2021)