Watch the Thalia Live 2.0 Demo Video–Shot Handheld with our Amazing Stabilization!

Tonemapped video in true HDR shot on nothing but an iPhone 6S.

Like it? Like us!

Or visit us on Facebook.

Watch it on Vimeo.

We’re more than a little proud of what we did years ago when for most computational videography on cellphones was just a distant vision in the future, so we're leaving our old demo videos up, even though with the better cameras on the latest phoens our app will, of course, make even greater videos. This is where it started, and it’s still the world’s most advanced real-time HDR video tonemapping on a phone!

This video was shot in 2015 in Illinois on the iPhone 6S using Thalia Live HD/R. Postprocessing was done in Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro.

Watch the Original Demo Video!

Tonemapped video in true HDR shot on nothing but an iPhone 6.

Like it? Like us!

Or visit us on Facebook.

Watch it on Vimeo.

This video was shot in 2014 in Illinois on the iPhone 6 using Thalia Live HD/R. Postprocessing was done in Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro. This early video shows some skipped frames, which has been fixed since. Taking the processing capability of the phone to its extreme unfortunately requires some amount of user feedback and field experience before we hit exactly the right balance between quality and speed for a given phone generation.

Shoot Your Own

Cameras in cell phones have made amazing progress over the past years. Thalia Live was originally developed for iPhone 6 where it delivered 720p video. With an iPhone 8 and up, you will get 4K video and amazing stabilization.
Get Thalia Live HD/R on the App Store.
Set your desired tonemapping settings. Thalia Live HD/R processes in real-time, so you can immediately observe how the image changes as you change parameters. For the somewhat overdone look people often associate with HDR photography, reduce global contrast and crank up local contrast, radius, gamma, and saturation. These settings will also bring out amazing detail in night scenes.
If so desired, you can postprocess the video you shot in pretty much any video editing software, from Apple’s iMovie on the iPhone to professional video editing software.
Amaze your friends!

How Does It Work?

The patented HD/R technology in Thalia Live HD/R uses the iPhone’s camera to obtain HDR pictures for each video frame and works magic (technical term: tonemapping) to turn them into a video stream reflecting the scene’s dynamic range. The tonemapping is necessary because normal displays cannot show a very high dynamic range, so tonemapping will make the bright parts darker and the dark parts brighter while preserving or enhancing local contrast. The magic in our proprietary image-processing technology:

Extremely fast real-time processing allows 30 frames per second at 4K resolution on modern iPhones. Consider that tonemapping a single photo on a powerful desktop computer could take minutes just a few years ago.
Virtually no ghosting and banding artifacts (‘ghosting’ and ‘banding’ are common problems with HDR processing)
Stores high-quality movies in Quicktime format in your phone’s camera roll
Full flexibility to change tonemapping parameters and see the result in real time: global contrast, local contrast, radius, noise reduction, gamma, and saturation. The exact meaning of these is somewhat involved, but if you just play with the sliders and explore, you will quickly get the hang of it.
Records sound together with the video

US Patents 9,955,084, 10,225,485, 10,277,771. Patents pending.

For even more dynamic range expansion in time-lapse videos or if you don't have at least an iPhone 6, try out the sister app Thalia Lapse HD/R.

Copyright © 2019 Promanthan LLC, Evanston, Illinois. All rights reserved.
Questions? Email us at
Privacy policy: Thalia Live HD/R may send general usage data such as histograms of images home to aid in development, but never the images or video files themselves. We may also use third parties to track installations and app starts, but no additional data is provided to these. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners and given merely for identification purposes.