After Yellow’s exhaustive and impressive look at HDRs in 10bit or 16bit, I thought that I would share my quicky approach that only results in 8bit images from Blender’s VSE. I guess you could get a much nicer result, which would be more flexible, in the compositor (where wide colour space actually works). But for now I like the access to timing tools and mix types available in the VSE timeline. If only it had a curve editor I would be happy.

Jump to youtube tutorial
If you like to edit your videos in the VSE (hard but do-able), then you might like to grade in the timeline. And this is a pretty straightforward way to get there.
  1. shoot video at 720 50p (or 60 if you like 30fps result)
  2. add the strip to the timeline
  3. add a speed effect strip to the shot, turn off “stretch to input length”, set “multiply speed” to 2.0
  4. drag the tail handle of the shot so that it runs at half it’s duration (dur/2)
  5. strip is now all dark frames
  6. duplicate the camera strip shot, move it up 1 layer
  7. nudge it’s first frame handle 1 frame to the right then drag shot back to line up with lower shot
  8. add another speed effect with “multiply speed” set to 2.0. This will all be light frames
  9. line up the 2 shots to start at the same point
  10. select both strips (meta each strip with its speed effect if you like) then add a Gamma Cross effect.
  11. Gamma effect strip should have “Default Fade” turned of with a value of 0.3. It’s “Blend” opacity value should be 1.0

You can vary the mix between light and dark frames by altering the the Gamma Cross “Fade” value.

To check that all this works create a waveform window from the VSE window.