Dolby Vision HDR: everything you need to know

[What Hi-Fi?]

Dolby Vision is gaining more traction across TVs, smartphones, service providers and 4K Blu-ray discs - but it's got hot competition from rival HDR formats.

Dolby Vision HDR: everything you need to know : Read more

 

[SoundOfMind]

It's unfortunate that there is usually an either / or choice between HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. Seems that if Dolby Vision is implemented that HDR10+ would require nothing other than firmware code. Could be a push from Dolby to exclude HDR10+. Beta vs VHS yet again?

 

[MidwestAudioMan]

I am not a fan of Dolby Vision. A TV can produce a certain amount of color and brightness or it cannot. Dobly is not all of a sudden making a TV prodcue colors it could not do before. It is some kind of software implementation that gets between the movie studio's creative efforts and the your TV. What I've noticed is too many movies are now too dark making it hard to see what is going on. Worse, you can't turn off the feature if you don't like it. Watch a Netflix show that is listed as Dolby Vision and one that is not. Often the one without Dolby Vision looks better to me. A movie's director of photography has access to the most advanced cameras with very high dynamic range and color gaumets. The post production people have the latest and greatest software to either enhanse the color and contrast or not. If they want a black and white movie with a low contrast look, then can dilver it. If they want an overly staturated, very contrasty film, they can do that too. Today's 4k OLED TV's can reprodcue whatever is feed to them. Why do we need Dobly to get in between this and muck it all up? Don't know how others feel, but I'm mad that I've got to squint to watch dark movie scenes now. Dobly fixed something that was not broken.

 

[joe23]

If you're finding that the standard version looks better than the Vision version then you're not watching it on very good hardware. Content creators are using the tools that are available to them and pushing the boundaries beyond anything that they've been able to do before. It's noticeable how certain scenes have become quite common in movies with Dolby Vision available. For instance take the fairground scene in Rocketman, or similarly, the fairground scene in Us. Both shot at night but the depth, the sumptuousness of the lighting colour and the stark contrast of the pitch black of the background against the illuminated areas up front are used to incredible effect, and add a tangible taste of foreboding in Us as the girl ventures away from the fairground and down onto the beach with the thunderstorm brewing in the background. These scenes are utterly breathtaking when viewed on a good Dolby Vision equipped screen.
You've also missed the point of the grading and mastering tools. Of course it's true to say you can get great results with HDR10+ but compromises have to be made in order to optimise the best scenes because you can only make one playback configuration for the whole movie. You don't have this limitation in Dolby Vision because the metadata descriptions allow you to optimise scene by scene or even frame by frame if you wish.

 

[MidwestAudioMan]

Hey Joe,

My hardware includes the LG OLED 77" CX, the source is an Oppo UHD 205, and the cable between the two is an Audioquest Chocolate HDMI. The TV and disk player are about as good as it gets and the HDMI cable is not too shabby either. Wrong #1.

Wrong #2 and thanks for the example is Rocketman which I happen to own the 4K disk. It sucks and is a good example of how bad Dolby Vision is. The particular scene you refereed to at the fairground is a lovely way to fast forward Elton from his boyhood gig at the bar, through the fairground scene, and ending up back at the bar but now as an adult. You are right the background is jet black, and the lights on the carnival rides are nicely bright and colorful. But did you happen to watch the actors? It is easy to miss because the are poorly lit. I was ready to scream at the director, Dexter Fletcher for not spending a few bucks on some Kleig lights so we could actually see the actor's faces clearly. But then I realize the issue is probably more to do with what happened in post production and Dolby Vision. BTW, the movie Arrival has the same issue. It is hard to see the actor's faces through most of that moive. Not all Dobly Vision is horrible. The Hobbit Trilogy is fairly good because Peter Jackson spent a lot of time sweating the details to get it right. But it is obvious from Rocketman and Arrival that not everyone working in Post has figured this new process out and the results are aweful.

Last, I think you are the one missing the point. There are three main steps a moive goes through to get to your eyeballs. 1. There is the camera and lighting. Without these two things you see nothing. An Arri Alexa today has 15 stops of dynamic range and can capture the little details in the darkest part or the brightest part of the scene. Production sets still use a lot of lighting to give those nice hair highlights, or to make sure you can see a face in a dark room. Step 2 is the post production. Using Davinici Resolve, an Adobe suite, or Final Cut, they are all good at giving a lot of latitude to adjust color, saturation, and contrast to get the final movie to where the director wants it. Step 3 is the TV/playback device. The LG TV I own boast of over a billion rich colors and infinite contrast. That's right from the LG website. Dolby is not going to pull details out of a scene if the camera did not capture those details. How much color you see will depend on how post production modifies those settings. Deeper colors, more brightness, back and white if that is your thing. The software they have can do it all. The TV, when it is one like an OLED, can produce all the colors and contrast you need? What can Dobly do? It is not creating something out of nothing. It is just a lot of marketing nonsense.

The point is no one needs or asked for Dobly Vision. It adds nothing that cannot be addressed anywhere along the production process from camera to my TV. That might be a partial explanation whey Samsung refused to add Dobly Vision to their TVs. In the end it appears to be a licensing scheme to make Dolby money. If you don't agree with that, then you need to answer the question why does one of the biggest TV manufacturers in the world skip Dobly Vision if it is so awesome? Much like the debate over MQA in the audio world. Some people have been convinced MQA is the greatest thing since sliced bread while others don't like what Bob Stuart of Meridian has brought with this new audio standard.

My personal view is MQA works, but Dolby Vision does not. I've listened to MQA music and can tell it sounds better 90% of the time. But from what I've seen with Dolby Vision is you have about a 50/50 chance that the movie will be enjoyable if it has Dolby Vision attached to it. I've spent too much money on my home theater system to have it ruined, in my opinion, by Dolby's standard that does not live up to the hype.

 

[joe23]

I think we'll very much have to agree to disagree on all of your points there , especially in terms of MQA which homogenises audio recordings to the point of sterility, sucking the life and soul out of them and I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole - If anything is marketing BS, it's MQA but my approach to listening to music is very different to watching movies. I have to admit that I've only seen Rocketman at an actual Dolby Cinema and cannot say that I noticed any issues with the lighting in the aforementioned scene - to me, it felt like looking out of a window out into a fairground and was pretty breathtaking, but I'm looking at the whole picture and not each individual actors face, so maybe I missed it, or maybe it's an issue with the transfer to BluRay. I'm looking for depth, emotion, vibrance and colour and so long as the picture conveys the emotion and what the director was trying to convey then that's what involves me in the movie and to me, Dolby Vision does all of that.

No one needs or asked for Dolby Vision you say? WRONG. Check out Joe Wright discussing creating Darkest Hour (another excellent example) in Dolby Vision here:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFE7w6OEe24
. That's just a single example. If no-one needs or wants Dolby Vision then why are both top movie directors and TV producers falling over themselves about it? TV manufacturers are out to do one thing - Sell their TVs. That's down to market forces, demand and costs, not passion for getting as closely to seeing what the director intended as possible (and I've worked for a number of TV manufacturers so I know what goes into speccing a new TV model). Whilst I certainly agree with you that post production still has a way to go to get the best out of the tools, that's not the format's fault and I imagine that as post houses get more used to working with Vision, we'll have some real visual feasts to look forward to.

Congratulations on your choice of TV by the way. The last few generations of LG TVs have been exemplary, and I guess you would have done so already, but if not, then it's definitely worth getting hold of someone with a colour spectrometer to get your white point and luminance levels absolutely spot on, it really does make a huge difference.

 

[MidwestAudioMan]

We will have to disagree, but appreciate your politeness in doing so.

I will discount the Darkest Hour video because it is obviously produced by Dolby. Dolby would not put on screen anyone who would not say how great Dolby is. However, I've not seen this movie and seeing this video made me order the 4k disk so not all is lost.

I have also discovered that some of my assumptions may be incorrect after reading an excellent article on the subject from Tom's Guide. https://www.tomsguide.com/us/what-is-dolby-vision-hdr,review-5138.html

It appears a new codec was needed to handle the expanded capabilities of TV like 4K OLED and that is either HDR10, HDR10+, or Dolby Vision. I did mention that when extra care is done to ensure a good result like in the Hobbit 4K, the result is good. But I stand by my statement that more often than not, the result is poor. Probably as much do to the inability of the studio to get it right. I think this is partly because the TV has gotten so good it is so much easier to see less than perfect productions. The studio has to work extra hard to be perfect otherwise we see the imperfections in a way that was hidden in the past. On this topic I am happy to meet you half way.

But all this leads me to one last soapbox issue of mine dealing with Dolby which is Dolby Atmos. In my view it is another marketing gimmick long on hype and short on anything worthwhile. If I hear the word immersive used to explain these things anymore I will barf. Immersive experience gets my vote as the most overused nonsense phrase in the English language. When Atmos first came out I went with the kids to a brand new Atmos theater to see Brave to learn what this was all about. The result was mostly a big distraction from enjoying the movie. Atmos was disorienting which was not helped by the theater having the sound turned up to an uncomfortable level. I guess immersive means to figuratively make your ears bleed. I can't see how Atmos can be a commercial success. Theaters will not increase revenue by offering it. Yet the equipment and all the speakers costs more. And in the home, I firmly believe most people are better served by buying better speakers than more speakers. If you have a $15,000 USD budget for speakers, please get five really good ones instead of 10 or more just OK speakers. The quality of the sound matters more than the quantity. Then there is the whole object orientation issue. With 5.1, the front speakers are in front of everyone in the room and the back speakers are behind everyone in the room. It is easy to locate sound this way. With Atmos in a theater with dozens of speakers all over the place, you might be sitting behind a speaker or in front of it depending on where you are sitting. Where is the sound supposed to come from? It is different for everyone. On its face it is a really bad idea.

To conclude, simpler is often better. Some of the best audio recordings are done with two really good microphones with a lot of care with their placement. When systems are kept simple and straight forward, everyone working on a film will have a better chance to implement them to the best effect. However this does not seem to be the Dolby way. Make it complex and expensive. Lets not forget the best movies have great acting and a great story. That is mostly what you need. The rest of it is marketing hype.

I can't wait to see Darkest Hour. Thanks for the tip.

 

[joe23]

I absolutely agree with you on marketing, and the marketeers are either treating us like idiots, or they don't have much of an idea about what Atmos is or should be themselves.

There were two major needs for Atmos, certainly in cinemas anyway. Dolby worked with studios and mixers to try and find a way to make every room, no matter what size, to convey an audio mix more accurately. The problem for the mixing studios was that movie mixes for 5.1/7.1 were being done in very highly specced mixing booths using top quality monitor speakers and amplification which was specced to work in that mixing room - How to translate that into a 1300 seat cinema where the surround speakers on the back walls are about 5 times the distance from the front speakers of the people sat in the front 3 rows and outputting half the volume of the fronts, and the bigger the room gets, the more disjointed a sound that has to travel from, say, front left to back right will become - Fine in a small room, but lost in a premium large screen cinema. So what you do is that you spec that you have enough speakers in the room which are angled in a way that provides no less than 30 degrees of coverage from each speaker, again no matter what size the room. Each speaker is timbre matched and level calibrated so that sound that has to travel from front left to rear right can now do so perfectly smoothly for every seat in the audience, not jut the people in the reference listening position. So now, instead of having a sound that starts in the front left speaker and ends up in the back right with a big gap in the middle, you use an object to move it smoothly from front left to back right, passing through as many overhead speakers as it needs to depending solely on the size of the room with no gaps in its travel. The system can be scaled to any size room and your audio mix will be conveying the original intentions whether there are 3 seats or 1300 seats. You really can fool the senses into thinking it's real with the right content. I've noticed a number of times that the sound of rain in a movie coming from overhead speakers actually makes the room feel like the temperature has dropped. It's spooky.

Which brings me onto the second requirement - Headroom. Movies have been getting louder and louder for years - This is down to the studios and mixers and is a practice akin to the audio loudness wars which do now thankfully seem to have abated, but unless a cinema is diligent with checking for comfortable listening levels and doing a practice run of each movie before it is played, you can be left with ringing ears at the end of a movie. The days of everything in a cinema being played back at reference level 7.0 are long gone because it's just too loud for the majority of todays movies. But MANY cinemas amplification and speakers are just not specced well enough for the rooms they are installed in and when trying to reproduce the levels of transients and louder passages, the amplifiers are running into clipping and speaker coils are overheating and distorting which all results in harsh, uncomfortable sound. ALL Dolby Atmos cinemas are commissioned and approved for installation and every piece of equipment on the reproduction end of the audio chain MUST have enough headroom to allow for 10% over even the loudest possible reproducible sound through that system. This guarantees lower distortion and better dynamics. More speakers and amplification channels also help here because you are not stressing each individual component anywhere near as much to get to the same overall level in the auditorium as you would with a standard 5.1/7.1 system, so even more headroom available.

Of course you still have the problem that if the movie was mixed too loud and has been compressed, squeezing all of the dynamic range out of it and your cinema has not been careful to adjust the playback level accordingly then you're still going to exit the cinema with your ears ringing, but a good cinema will ensure you're hearing that movie in the best way possible. A good Atmos mix should do exactly the opposite of the problems you have with it - For me it's not about the loud explosions and deep, floor rattling bass - It's all about the subtleties. Those tiny little sounds just audible out of the background and localised in one place, coming from a position you can pinpoint somewhere within the auditorium with extreme focus and the really creative stuff e.g going back to the fairground scene in 'Us' as the daughter is walking down the steps onto the beach and the thunderstorm is starting off in the distance - listen to the way the sound of the fairground ride is not only accurately placed as the camera pans around the girl, but how it grows into this sense of menace that she's about to get herself into trouble as she walks into the darkness, counterpointed with the clap of thunder coming in onto the shore. That scene is made by those sounds.

But on your point about the studios playing catch up to the technology, I totally agree and the same is true with Atmos mixes. Some mixes seem to be there for no other reason than getting a badge in your credits, Disney's content generally seems to go this way and much of the time I cannot tell the difference between the 5.1 and the Atmos mix, but you get a good one that's had a mixer worth his/her salt and the results can be totally breathtaking. For me, Gravity is still the reference Atmos mix. Glenn Freemantle won an Oscar for it and it's easy to tell why. There are times you feel like you're spinning around inside a space suit in the scenes with the satellite debris flying around. That has to be the most involving cinematic experience i have ever had from an audio point of view. I thought First Man was incredible too. A dialogue heavy film in many places but a perfect mix of low impact but very clear dialogue scenes with all out, edge of the seat, intense battering scenes in the rocket which were absolutely gripping.

The jury is still out for me on the home version of Atmos as it doesn't seem to be following the same specs that it does in the cinema and there seem to be too many compromises being made which I guess is down to the individual manufacturers' implementations but maybe that will improve over time, but even so, a domestic setup doesn't really require the levels of power to fill a huge room convincingly as cinemas do so it's never going to be such a big jump.

I hope you enjoy Darkest Hour.

 

[MidwestAudioMan]

When a theater gets past a certain size, I don't see how you can easily fix the poor experience with more speakers. In those venues the ceilings alone can be 100 feet high. Are you going to hang speakers on long polls from the ceiling making it look like a zoo? As a paying movie goer, I'd find a smaller theater to get the best expereince and I try to sit near the middle of the theater in the sweet spot for the sound mix and for viewing. I think most people understand if they are sitting in the front or back row, their visual expeirence will be vastly different as well as the sound. The goal then is to get to the theater early enough to pick a good seat or do reserve seating when available.

My home sound system is not super high-end, but it cost more than my first new car, and I am including the active speaker cables that cost more than any soundbar you can buy. I use a 5.2 system and the two subs in the front make a big difference. It took me a long time to dial in the setup. Subs should not stick out in the sound mix but support everything else with an extended bass; firm not boomy. As such the opening credits for the Tom Hank's film Greyhound is a good test. First comes on the Apple Logo, then the Sony Logo, then the title screen then fade to an aerial shot of the ships on a dreary day crossing the Atlantic. The bass through this sequence is very low, almost a moan. In the right size room with the right subs, the sound fills and pressurizes the room providing a visceral feel of the deep dark depth of the ocean. In a 200 seat theater you can get that quality of sound but it is not easy or cheap. In a 1,000 seat theater, you could still do it, but they'd have to charge a fortune to recoup the cost. I suppose anything is theoretically possible. Low sounds like at the begining of Greyhoud means moving a lot of air. Physics will limit what you can do in a huge room. Huge rooms are used to maximize the promoter's profit, not to provide a movie viewer with a great experience. If I were Dolby, I'm not sure I'd even want to try.

So perhaps Dolby deserves credit for trying something. But if quality of the experience is the key, it is up to theater owners to figure that out and decide where to put their money and to right-size the room. I personally have a long list of things that would come far before adding more speakers to improve the viewing of a movie. Super bummed that Arclight is going out of business. They were one of the few that tried hard to provide an experience good enough to make it worth the trip.

 

[fort-wayne]

I have a Sony UBP-X800M2 all-region player connected to a Sony X930E TV's HDMI input (Port #2). Audio is routed via HDMI from the TV (Port #3 with Audio Return Channel) to a Sony BDV-N5200W Home Theater's primary HDMI port (5.1 surround-sound). None of this is high end, but more toward middle range in their respective manufacturing years. I couldn't see spending over twice the price for an X1100ES for near zero gain. The N5200W provides excellent audio for my hearing which has suffered some degradation from decades of military service, and I can use it for playing 2k Blu-rays or DVDs. Its 5.1 audio is noticeably better than the TV's built-in sound system (which is much better than most TVs). The viewing space isn't completely optimal ambient lighting, but it's better than many. In addition to the Sony player and Home Theater, I also have a Roku Ultra that supports HDR.

Whether or not Dolby Vision provides all it's capabilities versus HDR or HDR10 depends on the entire video chain, starting with the transfer from film or digital. Transfers from digital now are nearly always from the 2k DI used to distribute the movie to theaters. This is not the same as 2k 1080 HD, but it's also not 4k UHD. The quality of the transfer - its color gamut and dynamic range - varies widely. HDR/10/10+ and Dolby Vision capabilities are only as good as the transfer. The next link in the chain is the 4k UHD player and its HDR and Dolby Vision implementation - or the streaming device such as a Roku or Apple TV. The next link in the chain . . . provided there is no 4k pass-through occurring in some other intermediate device . . . is the TV with its HDR and Dolby Vision implementation. The final link is the viewing space with its ambient lighting and location of viewer(s) versus the TV. I'm not considering the viewer . . . whose vision may be less than perfect and impaired. The final result is only as good as the weakest link from beginning to end.

First observation is streaming services . . .
This includes Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and Vudu. They may claim 4k, HDR and DV, but I'm not impressed at all with the quality of it. A well-rendered 4k disk with proper transfer from a high quality source runs circles around the same content streamed over the Internet. Even a properly made 2k Blu-ray nearly always outshines streaming content. I will not stream a movie unless there has never been a Blu-ray or 4k released globally - and the likelihood of one within the foreseeable future is near zero. The amount of compression used makes 4k laughably soft. HDR and alleged Dolby Vision is more often than not in name only. In summary, the content being delivered doesn't begin to use the capability of 4k UHD, HDR or DV.

It's been my experience with selectively upgrading my very large library of Blu-ray movies (over 2500) with several hundred 4k now that not all 4k UHD are created equal. The quality of the 4k UHD varies widely. That's the reason I've been very selective in which 2k Blu-rays I replace with 4k UHD. With some, there's no point in doing so as the 4k UHD doesn't deliver anything more than the 2k HD SDR already contains, especially with older movies. Quality of the 4k HDR/10/10+ and DV encoding also varies, just as it does with 2k HD SDR. Some movies have better 2k HD SDR encoding on the older Blu-ray release than the newer 4k UHD.

In summary . . .
Dolby Vision offers rendition in gamut and dynamic range that's visibly better than HDR10 . . . on my home system . . . if the encoding on the disk was properly done. I've seen the difference with my system. I have no opine yet regarding HDR10+ as I have nothing that will render it (player or TV). Streaming services do not perform 4k UHD HDR or DV very well with their extreme bandwidth limitations. Compare the bit rate of what is streamed over the Internet with the bit rate of a high quality 4k UHD disk. Even 2k Blu-rays have an order of magnitude higher bit rate. I don't bother trying to sort out what the content encoding is with any streaming movie . . . on those rare occasion I stream one. It's not worth the effort given the quality of what's being streamed. The alleged HDR and DV streamed is lackluster and that's an understatement. I view 4k UHD DV disks with DV turned on. Having been selective about which I've bought, they're generally better gamut and dynamic range than with DV turned off. It all starts with the source material. If that or the encoding is less than high quality, the result at the viewer's eyes will be lacking in quality.