It’s really
mind-
blowing
and game-
changing
for
content
creators
”
Vision natively or to facilitate the
creation of Dolby Vision content,
then all the way through the post-
production chain, into the final
content delivery and encoding to
the home, whether through OTT
streaming providers or traditional
broadcasters.
How much would a broadcaster
need to change to adopt Dolby
Vision into their workflow?
Everyone who looks at new
technology wants to minimise the
impact of having to buy new
equipment or change entire
workflows. And we understand
that very well. We have a long-
standing history with broadcasters
around the world from our audio
business, and we understand what
it takes to get new technologies
adopted by those broadcasters.
What we have done is develop
mechanisms in Dolby Vision that
allow broadcasters to fairly
seamlessly integrate it into their
workflow. We are working with
broadcast camera manufacturers to
integrate our technology
components in ways that are fairly
straightforward to pass the signal
all the way through the broadcast
chain and through to the final
delivery mechanism. Those are not
all in place yet. We’re at the early
stages. We’re starting with movies –
and movies are, of course, always a
much simpler use case for these
kinds of things. But we have started
to think about the live broadcast
cases and we’re making some good
progress there. We’ll be showing
some advances at IBC in Amsterdam.
Where is the Dolby Vision content
going to come from?
We have just announced a partnership
with Deluxe. They are starting to
grade movies in Dolby Vision, and
so they are the first officially
certified colour grading facility for
Dolby Vision. We’re also working
with manufacturers of colour
grading tools. The first company
we’ve been working with is Filmlight,
based in London. Their tool, Baselight,
is the first grading tool equipped
with Dolby Vision capabilities. SGO
is also going to announce Dolby
Vision capabilities in Mistika.
All this needs to be in place now,
so when we launch Dolby Vision at
the end of this year with the first
consumer TVs, and the first service
providers, there will actually be
movies available to stream and to
watch. The partners that we will
start with in the US include Amazon,
Netflix, Hulu and XBox Video.
What is the reaction from the
content creators themselves?
It’s been phenomenal. They
absolutely love it. We’ve shown this
to basically all of the A-list
directors. From every single one,
the reaction was that they cannot
imagine a future without Dolby
Vision. They actually all got pretty
depressed over the fact that they’ve
had to work without Dolby Vision
in the past, seeing what they were
seeing.
What we did was actually
regrade clips from their own
movies. We went back to the
original master – not the one that
was released in cinemas, but
further upstream. With J.J. Abrams’
Star Trek Into Darkness
we went
back to the original source files at
Industrial Light and Magic and
regraded from those and achieved a
much higher fidelity version of that
same movie. J.J. Abrams thought he
had already seen the ultimate
version of that movie, until he saw
the version that we were able to
produce, and he just couldn’t
believe it. So it’s really mind-
blowing and really game-changing
for these guys.
Thank you, Roland Vlaicu.
“
