GrayMeta has unveiled Iris 3.0, a professional high dynamic range video player for the media and entertainment industry. According to the company, Iris 3.0 is the world’s only multi-format, broadcast quality media player and desktop collaboration tool that supports the up-conversion of SDR content to HDR to allow for accessible and affordable use of media companies’ current equipment. The collaboration tool provides quality control features including, on screen drawing, file checking templates, timeline annotations and shares messages securely and instantly with key stakeholders.
HDR is poised to be the next big thing in media and entertainment – providing deeper and more accurate colors, and lighting effects will appear more lifelike. Previously, media companies and studios would have to purchase expensive televisions and displays to view HDR video content.
“Iris is already the most popular and pervasive reference video playback and collaboration tool in the world,” said Mark Gray, GrayMeta. “By building upon GrayMeta’s leadership in the media industry, Iris 3.0 now offers professionals the ability to grow their business and adoption of HDR cost effectively. We are excited to bring HDR video quality to the mainstream by reducing the high prices and dearth of video sources.”
Iris 3.0 is an award winning professional SDR and HDR media player renowned for critical viewing and quality control, enabling any television or monitor can view HDR video. If users already have an HDR-capable display, the player will make SDR content look even more rich and colorful, taking advantage of the full gamut of colors and brightness. With Iris 3.0 player users can watch SDR and HDR side-by-side in a split-screen image and use the combination collaboration tool to create on screen drawings, file check templates, timeline annotations and share messages.
Iris 3.0 can measure the new HDR color spectrum. HDR expands the range of both contrast and color significantly. Bright parts of the image can get much brighter, so the image seems to have more depth. Colors get expanded to show more bright blues, greens, reds and everything in between.
For the first time, users can see and understand the color spectrum and how it fits into all the various color spaces in real time. How does this fit into BT.2020? 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.
Iris 3.0 also ensures your captions are located correctly by extending 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 3.0 can now search within captions and subtitles, and export them to CSV.
Iris 3.0 has made a breakthrough in JPEG2000 software decoding and can now provide a stable viewing experience at visually lossless quality for BCP Level 7.
Iris 3.0 now supports even more formats including, 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. A complete list of supporting formats can be found here.