Leave the audio settings to if you want to keep the original high-quality surround sound (like Dolby Atmos or DTS-HD).
Once you've dialed in your perfect settings, save them as a custom preset. Click the menu, select "Add Preset," give it a descriptive name (e.g., "HDR-to-SDR 1080p"), and choose "Keep" for picture size. Your preset will appear in the sidebar for one-click application to future sources.
Before diving into the technical steps, it's worth understanding the scenarios where converting HDR to SDR is the right choice:
This guide is your complete walkthrough for converting HDR video to SDR using HandBrake, ensuring your footage looks consistent and balanced across all devices and editors. It tackles the specific challenges of tone mapping, color space adjustment, and settings optimization to help you achieve the best possible results. convert hdr to sdr handbrake
The technical magic that makes this possible is called . Tone mapping is the process of taking the wide brightness range of an HDR video (often with a peak luminance of 1000 nits) and compressing it into the much narrower range of an SDR video (generally around 100 nits) while preserving as much detail as possible. In HandBrake, this is accomplished primarily through the Colorspace filter, which also handles the critical switch from the wide HDR color gamut (BT.2020) to the standard SDR gamut (BT.709).
If you prefer using HandBrake’s Command Line Interface (CLI) or want to batch-script your workflow, you can trigger the HDR-to-SDR conversion using the following filter argument:
Click on the tab. This is crucial for fixing the "washed-out" look. Leave the audio settings to if you want
Some older editing software handles SDR better than HDR. Step-by-Step: Converting HDR to SDR in HandBrake
Select . This tells HandBrake to convert the input colors to the standard SDR profile .
For most users, this single setting in HandBrake will fix the colors: : Load your HDR video file. Your preset will appear in the sidebar for
By changing this, you are telling HandBrake to convert the source video's color information from the HDR/BT.2020 color space to the SDR/BT.709 standard. This is the single action that "removes" the HDR and fixes the brightness and color issues. Do not skip this step.
While selecting "BT.709" works well, the heart of a good HDR-to-SDR conversion lies in —the process of compressing a video's wide range of brightness into the limited range of SDR. Understanding a few advanced concepts can help you achieve perfect results.
Launch HandBrake and click on the button. Navigate to your HDR video file and select it. Once loaded, you'll be on the "Summary" tab.
Even if the output is SDR, setting the encoder to 10-bit (if using x265) can help prevent color banding in the final video.