Deluxe Speaks Dolby Vision on the Ins and Outs of HDR
By Jim Bask
Bryant Frazer of Studio Daily stuck around for a great interview from Deluxe VP of Editorial Services Jay Tilin and colorist Martin Zeichner about using HDR
Deluxe Talks Dolby Vision, Daredevil and the Ins and Outs of HDR
Editorial Services VP Jay Tilin & Colorist Martin Zeichner on Doing Research, Making Metadata, and Setting DPs at Ease
Earlier this fall, Netflix summoned an array of technology journalists to New York to teach them about high dynamic range (HDR) technology, using the OTT
operator’s range of Marvel superhero shows as a guide. The still-forthcoming Iron Fist is Netflix’s first Dolby Vision original show — that is, cinematographer Manuel Billeter is conceiving it for HDR from square one, rather than having it regraded after the SDR version has already been completed. But the case study for post-production was Daredevil, which was regraded for HDR by colorist Tony D’Amore at Deluxe’s L.A. facility. With reporters assembled in a grading suite at Deluxe in New York, D’Amore called in via telephone and oversaw a remote-grading session, controlling the New York office’s Da Vinci Resolve software from the other coast and explaining the Dolby Vision process.
(Deluxe’s claim to HDR fame?
The company has worked on more than 100 HDR titles — including, in its New York office, season 2 of Netflix’s Marco Polo, which it says was the first-ever Dolby Vision show.)
D’Amore described Dolby’s crucial “content mapping” software, which analyzes the image to create metadata that will allow the image to appear correctly on playback, with brightness levels re-mapped to match the specific capabilities of any Dolby Vision-equipped display. The standard display used by Deluxe for HDR grading is the Dolby Pulsar monitor, which is a 4,000-nit display that far outstrips consumer monitor capabilities. (One nit = 1 candela per square meter.) Even so, it doesn’t come close to maxing out the HDR spec, which supports up to 10,000 nits. For comparison’s sake, Deluxe colorist Martin Zeichner said the Rec. 709 spec allows for 100 nits of peak brightness, while laser projectors in a theatrical setting can reach up to about 1,600 nits. The trick is generating metadata that will allow the image to be generated correctly under a range of varying viewing conditions.
“We’re protected
for the future — just in case somebody does one day have a 4,000 nit TV, we’re grading all the way up to it,” D’Amore noted. “Even if you have a 600 nit TV, the mapping pushes the limits of the set you’re watching on…. For the most part, anything above 500 nits is going to be really impressive.”
How bright is too bright? Spectacular highlights on the Pulsar monitor were sometimes quite literally dazzling, making it difficult to focus on the very bright screen in the dark room. In response to a question from StudioDaily about the possible emergence of best practices for limiting brightness levels, D’Amore said HDR simply takes some getting used to. “Every DP
I’ve worked with so far on any of these shows I’ve done in HDR has said the same thing,” he admitted. “The usual first reaction is, ‘I don’t like it. It’s too bright. It’s blinding me.’ But what you notice is, the more you watch it, your eyes adjust to it…. It makes it true to life.”
StudioDaily stuck around after the demo for an extended conversation with Zeichner and Jay Tilin, VP of Editorial Services for Deluxe and Company 3 in New York, about Deluxe’s experiences implementing its HDR workflow. An edited transcript follows.
Colorist Martin Zeichner sits at the control panel at Deluxe’s New York facility.
StudioDaily: I’m thinking about two different questions. One is, for the colorist and the facility, how much does this complicate workflow in terms of color management — making sure you’re in the right color space and calibrated to work in HDR properly? And then on the other hand, when you bring in DPs in who are unfamiliar with this technology, what do you do to make them comfortable and keep them creatively on
point?
Jay Tilin: They’re related questions.
StudioDaily: Where should we start to address them?
JT: How about the beginning?
Martin Zeichner: The beginning, for us, was February of 2015. We had done the first season of Marco Polo in 2014 and we were gearing up to do the second season. Dolby knew that Netflix wanted the second season of Marco Polo to be graded for high dynamic range. So they invited us and a few other people to their office in midtown Manhattan to view the Pulsar monitor and a Maui monitor. To see what we were getting into.
JT: That was our introduction. Ta-dah! Here is HDR. This is it what it can do, this is it what it can be.
MZ: They had an episode of Marco Polo from the first season that had been regraded to HDR in California. I was very familiar with the SDR, but it was an exciting surprise for me to see what it could be [in HDR]. They also had a trailer from the first season that had been regraded for HDR. And they also had some other content so that we could get a feel for this. From that, we were left to do our own research, consulting with Dolby engineers along the way. We had a lot of discussions between ourselves and the producers of Marco Polo, the Weinstein Company, and also the directors of photography …
JT: And Netflix.
MZ: And Netflix. And we had a lot of questions, as you can imagine. We came up with ways of either solving those problems ourselves or knowing what questions to ask the Dolby engineers.
JT: That was our introduction to the process. We talked about what the endgame was, what we wanted to achieve, and then set out to do our research. We went back and learned all about what the cameras are capable of, what bit rate would mean to the process, what resolution would mean to the process, what the monitoring environment would mean to the process, and basically educated ourself as deeply as possible in terms of what the process would entail before we even got our hands on the tools with which we could start creating the images.
MZ: And this was even well before shooting began on the second season.
JT: Before production ever started. Aa lot of this, I believe, was because we wanted to lessen the impact for the DPs and the directors in terms of the complicated nature of what it could be. We learned about the LUTs and the PQ color space and how we were going to get from what the camera shoots into these color spaces. We involved our image science and our color science teams at Efilm — and the Marco Polo production had already decided they were going to shoot with basically the perfect camera for high dynamic range, the Sony F55, which is a full 16-bit camera. They were already shooting raw. They had already, in effect, done [HDR production] in season 1. So we went to all of the vendors and all of the manufacturers and researched and got as much information as we could, not only so that we could understand it, but to simplify it for the creatives as much as possible. We didn’t want to burden the DP if he didn’t need it or want it. He wants to know what his image is going to look like. We worried about the technical details.
MZ: We want to take the technical details as our starting point and use that to solve aesthetic problems and present it to the directors of photography and the executive producers who are not necessarily versed in the same things we are. There were three directors of photography — one of them was in South Africa so I never met him face to face, but the other two would work with me like five days on each episode — and what I found was that, as time went on, they were more and more willing to exploit HDR. At first they were rather conservative about it, and later on they became more exploitive of it. Which was something that Dolby wanted to see. They wanted Marco Polo to be their showcase for HDR.
SD: Right. And it’s interesting because it’s not just that the DPs haven’t seen something like this on a TV monitor.
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