Blame Journalists for Instigating HDR 'Format War' Talk, Says Dolby Executive

Dolby Vision as a platform is a “larger set” of parameters that contains all the specs of HDR10, but “also includes display-mapping dynamic metadata,” Husak said. SMPTE spec ST 2094-10, to which Dolby Vision conforms, is among a new “suite” of documents that defines metadata for use in “color volume transforms of content,” SMPTE said in a recent project summary. The metadata are “content-dependent” and can vary scene by scene or image by image. They’re intended to transform HDR and wide color gamut “image essence for presentation on a display having a smaller color volume than that of the mastering display used for mastering the image essence,” SMPTE said. That Dolby Vision relies so heavily on dynamic metadata is one reason why advocates like the BBC have turned to alternative metadata-free platforms, especially for HDR broadcasting (see 1610030004).

There’s “clear value” in adopting Dolby Vision over systems like HDR10 that don’t use ST 2094-10-based dynamic metadata, Husak said. Dolby’s PR department “trolls the internet looking for all these reviews, both positive and negative,” he said. “Just anecdotally, I’d say there’s well over 95 to 97 percent that speak in favor” of Dolby Vision “over HDR10 systems,” he said. The “key things” most reviewers say about Dolby Vision is that colors are “accurate” and “consistent, shot to shot,” compared with HDR10, and the TV “can be adapted to the content much better” using Dolby Vision, he said. Citing an onscreen Forbes review that called Dolby Vision a “superior format,” Husak said, “If the future plays out the way we see it and the way our partners see it,” Dolby Vision should become “the standard HDR format, at least for the high end.”

With HDR10, “if the content’s flat and doesn’t have a whole lot of sparkle to it, then there’s not much in the color volume to do anything” with it in an HDR TV, Husak told us in Q&A. “I’ll take the extreme. If it’s a black-and-white image that doesn’t go above 1,000 nits, then it is what it is. Dolby Vision shines where the content is rich with color, rich with sparkles, deep blacks. So it really depends on the dynamic range, both the luminance and in the color volume space.”

Over the top and Ultra HD Blu-ray have “the largest amount of HDR content that’s available to the consumer,” and Dolby has been “at the forefront of producing and delivering that data,” Husak said. Amazon, Netflix and Vudu collectively have “several hundred hours worth of” Dolby Vision HDR content available, “both on the cinematic side and the episodic side,” he said. Dolby has been working on HDR for about 10 years, “and actively preparing for the delivery and the workflows for about two years,” he said.

SMPTE Conference Notebook

Adaptive bit-rate streaming, designed to improve the performance of OTT services by eliminating buffering and other unwelcome phenomena, to “a certain extent, it’s a lie,” said Yoel Zanger, CEO and founder of Giraffic. “Consumers are paying and subscribing to services in 4K or in HD,” when “in fact, maybe 50 or 70 percent of the time,” they’re not getting it because of limitations from the “complexities of the ecosystem,” he said. Giraffic markets apps-embedded “adaptive video acceleration” technology for improving OTT delivery, and estimates its technology is installed on more than 70 million devices globally, he said. Except for the most “premium” apps, like those of Disney or Major League Baseball, “we are actually quite surprised when we are analyzing so many applications on our installed base and find that none of them really implement adaptive streaming in an optimized manner,” he said. Problem is, with HDR becoming more prevalent on OTT services, “these quality drops are much more visible to the human eye,” Zanger said. “So I’m guessing that I, or maybe even my mother, could never tell the difference between 720p and 1080p.” But with HDR, “anybody will tell the difference if the quality drops from 1080p to 720p,” or even to “lower bit resolutions because the artifacts are suddenly more apparent,” he said. “One of the challenges today is that 20 percent of the users suffer bit-rate switching every 30 seconds” in streaming OTT content, he said. “So basically, you’re watching a movie, and the quality switches all the time.”

Many argue it’s “not possible to discern the individual pixels in a 4K image” on a 55-inch TV from a viewing distance of more than three feet away, said William Cooper, founder of the independent consulting firm informitv and onetime head of BBC online and interactive services. "The reality is that a comfortable screen size and viewing distance will be determined by many factors, from the size of the room and the number of viewers to individual preferences, based on eyesight and how much field of view they want to fill,” Cooper said. “We don’t need to sit nearer a screen simply because it’s got higher resolution. What’s the ideal viewing distance for a painting? It’s the wrong question. Besides, we don’t always sit the same distance from a screen. We might walk past it occasionally. We might move close to it. But when you view that image, it forms a perception that stays with us about the quality of that image.”