Is Dolby Vision Better Rendered on OLED or LCD? Dolby Colorist Won’t Say
HOLLYWOOD -- New “storytelling techniques and tools” are “starting to emerge” with the advent of high-dynamic-range technologies like Dolby Vision, and those tools are just now beginning to be put to the test, Shane Mario Ruggieri, a colorist in Dolby’s Advanced Technology Group, told the Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers conference. The Tuesday session in which Ruggieri spoke was billed as summarizing a “colorist’s view of HDR grading.”
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In a recent experiment, Dolby Labs scientists used “thermal imaging cameras” to measure the skin responses of audience members when they were shown Dolby Vision HDR scenes depicting fire at 4,000 nits of peak brightness, said Ruggieri, listed in the SMPTE conference program as an “expert speaker” on Dolby Vision. “Their faces would flush,” he said. “That’s a physical response. Their bodies were telling them that that was real. That’s pretty cool as a storyteller, if you engage them somehow like that.”
The same holds true with depicting “glare” in an HDR scene, Ruggieri said. “I used to have to bloom fake glare on TVs, because you really couldn’t create it.” With HDR, “now I can create glare in your eye,” he said. “There’s like an authenticity there that you experience. I like it.”
In Q&A, Ruggieri sidestepped our question whether he thinks, as a colorist, the types of Dolby Vision images he described as causing audience members’ faces to flush were better rendered on an OLED screen or an LED-backlit LCD TV, given that Dolby Vision landed support for both types of displays. “Each dynamic range that you have and each screen that you have is going to have a certain impactability, if you will,” he said. “What those are, I don’t know. I don’t know what the impactability of an OLED versus an LED scientifically is. What I can say about an OLED is I can get better darks. I can get much more range in the dark at the bottom end.”
With HDR still “in its infancy, these questions are being answered,” Ruggieri said. “What Dolby Vision will provide you is the ability to control those images.” If one looks “at all the other formats out there” for HDR, “I don’t see them controlling as much as we offer,” he said. Content creators and consumers ultimately will decide which types of displays render the best Dolby Vision storytelling, he said.
“I get” why people think only 1,000 nits of peak brightness on an HDR screen is “an end-all, be-all” experience, “and why they think it’s so wonderful,” Ruggieri said. “It makes sense. It looks like a great image.” He used to think so himself, he said. “That was before I saw an image at 20,000 nits,” he said. “That looked like a window looking outside.” When he saw that, “that changed how I engage with my media,” he said. “As a colorist who’s interested in telling stories, that was pretty engaging for me. It changed how I saw content and telling stories.” SMPTE standards on HDR provide for future headroom of 10,000 nits of peak brightness, though it's questionable when or whether consumer displays capable of such performance will become available commercially (see 1509280036).
The colorist’s job is to “manipulate” color and imagery to tell a story, Ruggieri said. As he and other Dolby colorists “explored what to do with this dynamic range, we were discovering new levels of skin tone,” he said. “We had a larger range of creative intent.” In a scene, “we could create a larger range of sickness, we could create a larger range of health, a larger range of arousal in skin,” he said. New “physiological and psychological studies” will need to be done on HDR to see how audiences “react to certain things” on the screen, Ruggieri said. “That’s all going to come into play. It’s going to be pretty fun."