Be Excellent To Each Other

Griffis is a longtime proponent for better pixels as opposed to more pixels, meaning brighter images with more colors. And in December, at Dolbys offices in Burbank, Griffis and Dolby offered up a tech demonstration of a new imaging technology that showed the impact better pixels can have, delivering a wow factor not even early UHD TVs can match. The company plans to unveil the name for the new tech next week at CES, where it will have its first public showing.

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The Dolby demo, showing a 1080p HD picture with pumped-up brightness and color, was a startling improvement over even the best TVs available today, including the early UHD models. Metallic surfaces gleam like mirrors. Colors glow, luminous and rich. Highlights and shadows alike keep their detail. What's more, unlike 4K TV, that improvement is visible even at a distance from the screen.

Its as striking and impressive a difference as the difference between standard-definition and HD video. If you see it, you'll want one for your living room. Now.

High Dynamic Range imaging, which makes the highlights brighter and the shadows darker, has long been considered low-hanging fruit by technologists in the digital imaging field. Many have long wondered why Hollywood and the camera and TV makers havent embraced it sooner, as they watched money flow into adding more pixels (standard-def to HDTV, 2K to 4K in cinemas), higher frame rates and 3D. Ultra HD will include some improvement in Dynamic Range, but those improvements haven't fully arrived in the early models, and Dolby's technology is even more ambitious than UHD.

A little background on brightness: The unit for luminance, or photons per unit of area, is nits. TV technicians talk about nits, cinema technicians use other units; Dolby is hoping everyone will settle on nits and have a common language.

Full noonday sun is around 1.6 billion nits. Moonlight is around 0.01 nits. Starlight is 0.0001 nits. That dynamic range is far, far greater than anything that televisions, device displays or movie theaters can reproduce. Moreover, it's far greater than anything televisions or movie projectors even try to reproduce.

The limitations on TV and cinema dynamic range come from technologies that are barely used anymore: film projectors and cathode-ray-tube televisions. Color CRT picture tubes could get up to around 100 nits, so thats what TV programs are color-graded for. Todays flatscreen TVs, however, are generally capable of 300-500 nits, and at least one model reaches 1,000 nits. (Televisions) have that headroom because they know light sells, says Griffis. The consumer guys have already eclipsed by five times or more (the brightness from) the studios, who are still living in the world of the 100-nit color grade.

Screen brightness and color go hand in hand. With images so dim compared to the real world, there are great swaths of the visible color spectrum that no TV can reproduce, especially lighter shades.

Dolby demonstrated a (still officially unnamed) technology consumers would never see directly: A way of encoding a picture with a dynamic range that goes from from zero nits, i.e. total blackness, to 10,000 nits. Thats 100 times the peak brightness of a standard TV image today, and far more than any consumer TV today can deliver. In fact, to demonstrate their system, Dolby had to build a custom monitor that can pump out 4,000 nits. (The company has no plans, it says, to turn its prototype monitor into a consumer product.)

Its no secret that within Hollywood many folks have been somewhat ho-hum about the value of 4K over 2K, says Griffis. He is careful not to criticize the impending 4K wave that is about to sweep over the entertainment landscape, saying We love all our pixels equally, but he is an evangelist for better pixels, not just more pixels.

The incremental cost to do this is much less than the incremental cost to do 4K, he points out. Having better pixels actually costs less than having more pixels.

Todays digital cinema cameras like the Sony F65, Arri Alexa and RED cameras already can record the kind of dynamic range Dolby wants to deliver to consumers, but producers and studios have to compress it and color grade it for existing standards. Much of the dynamic range information is lost along the way. Dolby is hoping to create a future-proofed container for image information, big enough that studios can return to it as display technology improves.

TrentPancakes Dec 5, 2013

@bosslugger I work in feature film VFX, so I might have some insight for you. I've been eyes-on with HDR displays in the past, and I firmly believe that HDR, if properly implemented, will be the next big thing in displays.

When we work on films, we're working with floating point (HDR) images from beginning to end. The highest RGB value that you can store on a Blu-ray or display on a TV is (1.0, 1.0, 1.0). But film (and digital cinema cameras) can easily record pixels with values that have brightness values of 60.0, 100.0, and higher. To get those values onto your screen at home, we do a soft rolloff of those high values to get them clamped back down to 1.0.

On a properly exposed frame of film (or digital cinema frame), the majority of the screen is still in that 0-1 range, but it's the bright highlights, reflections, fires, muzzle flashes, headlights... that sort of thing... that push past 1.0 and into that high dynamic range. Seeing those pixels properly exposed on an HDR screen is absolutely astounding. The demos that I watched on HDR monitors showed a dark kitchen interior, with a bright sunny day outside. You could see all of the detail in the shadowy room, but instead of the window being clamped at 1.0, you saw a bright world of detail out there, just like you were looking at the real thing.

To answer your questions, the color accuracy is great. All of the range from 0-1 is still exactly the same, there's just more output in the highlights. And footage wouldn't be interpreted as overblown since a correctly exposed frame is still mostly in the low dynamic space. However, it could be exploited by advertisers to "out bright" each other. Imagine watching a nice moody and dark show, and a car commercial comes on where the nominal brightness is 15 times what you were just watching.

Forget 3D (it's already losing favor in the studios, and completely lost the market at home), forget high frame rate. HDR is the best thing I've put eyes on, and I can't wait until everyone can see it for themselves.

TrentPancakes Dec 6, 2013

@TheRequiem I couldn't disagree more, but that's the beauty of opinions. I will say, from a production standpoint, HDR is practically as simple as exporting your final frames in a different format. We're already HDR end-to-end, and it's the output for digital where we clamp the dynamic range. The biggest drawback with HDR is everyone would need a new (expensive) TV to enjoy it. But unlike 3D, it's an easy sell. You see it and you're immediately like "dayyyyum!" You could easily change your mind about high frame rate after you see an HDR display.

High frame rate would double the amount of computing power necessary to make films, and double the amount of disk space. I'm not saying you shouldn't do things if they're hard, but budgets are already razor-thin on films and TV, and saying "yeah, we need to buy a few thousand new render cores" will make any studio say "nope."

For that same reason you're going to see a slow crawl to 4K content. I've worked on a few "4K" films now, and every single one of those is shot 4K, downsampled to another resolution (usually 2K), all post-production takes place in that lower resolution, then it's upscaled at the last moment for "4K" output. 4K puts an even bigger strain on infrasturcture than high frame rate does. You're now rendering 4 times the data. I only know of one film that's actually had a 4K production. All of your 2014 Summer blockbusters are being done 2K-3.5K and scaled up at the end.

This is what happens when photographers go and butcher the term HDR to mean something completely different. Then Dolby comes along with a display prototype that should be rightly called an HDR display, but they can't use it. Cos of those stinkin' photographers.

But shouldn't you be editing on the most common sort of monitor people have?

Like when Run DMC made albums, they would listen to them in cars or on portable stereos because that's how people would be listening so there's no point in mixing them so they sounded good in the studio.

Several recording studios that I've been in have massive quality speakers, but also a crappy pair of PC speakers plugged in to the desk.

It's easy to get carried away when you're listening on speakers that cost more than a car.

But if you picked some randomly crappy monitor then you could end up making something that looked ok on that but then awful on everything else.

But shouldn't you be editing on the most common sort of monitor people have?

Always amazes me how shops spend no time setting up screens like this.

No, because people have crap panels with the colour turned up to 11 and all sort of enhancement cack turned on. It's one thing checking it on a domestic TV, quite another editing on one.

Meanwhile if you have £68,500 to spare:

http://cvp.com/index.php?t=product/tv_logic_lum-560w

Throw in another 9K if you want speakers.

Wow, what could that TV possibly do that makes it that expensive?

Wow, what could that TV possibly do that makes it that expensive? Or is it an error?

No, because people have crap panels with the colour turned up to 11 and all sort of enhancement cack turned on. It's one thing checking it on a domestic TV, quite another editing on one.

Meanwhile if you have £68,500 to spare:

http://cvp.com/index.php?t=product/tv_logic_lum-560w

Throw in another 9K if you want speakers.

Wow, what could that TV possibly do that makes it that expensive?

10 bit screen? My SNES had 16 of em yonks ago.