Singularity is Blender Studio’s latest open movie – an adventure of cosmic scale painted in vibrant watercolor. It is also our first film mastered in 4K HDR with a full color grade done in Blender’s Video Sequence Editor.

4K resolution, HDR delivery, massive environments with complex geometry – Singularity’s production profile put daily builds of Blender 5.x on a tough quest in search of optimization, demolishing constraints and exploring new realms. That resulted in a list of changes in Blender 5.0 that also paved the way for further feature development in Blender 5.2 LTS, which is now in Beta.

HDR video in & out

The highlight of the Singularity effect is that Blender is now able to read and write HDR video directly. You can handle the final assembly step in the VSE, saving time and resources by avoiding round-trips to other tools. SDR and HDR masters can come from the same timeline.

On import, Blender reads PQ (Rec.2100 / SMPTE ST 2084) or HLG (Rec.2100 / ARIB STD-B67) from file metadata and sets each video strip’s input color space accordingly. On export, H.265 and AV1 encoders expose PQ and HLG modes, with 100 nits reference white and full-range YUV.

Scopes that work for HDR

The sequencer scopes were rebuilt for HDR and wide-gamut work. Histograms, waveforms, and vectorscopes now support P3 and Rec.2020 where needed, and run faster at 4K. Before this, scopes were of limited use for over-bright data and slow at high resolution. That is a practical problem when you are matching shots on an HDR conform.

Grading in the sequencer with compositor nodes

The second major piece of VSE finishing is compositor nodes on timeline strips. Modifiers and effect strips are driven by compositor node groups, instead of the limited VSE color strips available before. The compositor assets library was also updated with new node assets that you can add from the strip modifier menu like built-in tools.

But wait, there is more!

Singularity’s production has wrapped, but related finishing and pipeline work continued into Blender 5.2 LTS, now in Beta. Two areas stand out in that release: compositor performance for interactive work, and memory use on texture-heavy scenes.

Compositor speed and studio comp workflows

The interactive compositor in the Image Editor, where you tweak grades on stills or buffers, got a large responsiveness pass in 5.2. Related changes matter for finishing: compositor playback over time, less redundant re-computation when you undo unrelated work in the 3D view, lazy evaluation on static Switch branches, much faster Dilate/Erode at large sizes, and better downsampling when scaling plates down in comp. Shot comp on Singularity (flares, per-shot treatments) and the later VSE grade shared the same node ecosystem; speeding the Image Editor path affects both.

Memory on texture-heavy scenes

Blender 5.2 adds a Cycles texture cache: tiled .tx files beside sources, loading only the tiles and mip levels needed per render tile. The Simplify panel now uses a single Texture Resolution percentage for viewport work. At 4K and above, cache memory stays roughly stable per render tile; smaller render tiles (1024 or 512 instead of 2048) trade a bit of speed for less RAM on slower machines.

Where this shows up for you

If you work on short films or series, the practical shift is finishing steps: HDR import and export, float proxies, compositor modifiers on strips, and scopes that read HDR without leaving Blender for the master. If you work on lookdev and lighting, the texture cache is the main lever on large, map-heavy scenes. Download Blender 5.2. LTS Beta and put new features to the test!