Colored at Company 3 with Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, It's the First Film to Be Screened in Dolby Vision

Want to see the Dolby Vision HDR format in action? You can check it out at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where Disney's Tomorrowland—the first film graded for Dolby Vision—is enjoying a four-week run. AMC has the system installed in one auditorium each at the AMC North Point Mall 12 in Atlanta, the AMC BarryWoods 24 in Kansas City, and the AMC Deerbrook 24 in Houston. On May 29, those theaters replaced Tomorrowland with San Andreas, the first Dolby Vision title from Warner Bros. Pixar's Inside Out, opening June 19, will be the next fix for HDR junkies who crave brighter whites and broader dynamic range.

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Click the image to load the full SMPTE presentation [PDF].

The key to efficiently encoding all of the brightness information in a HDR picture for Dolby Vision is something called the perceptual quantizer, or PQ for short. Dolby researched human visual perception of luminance changes, then developed a new quantization curve based on those findings. The goal was to specify brightness levels from 0 to 10,000 cd/m2 using 10-bit or 12-bit encoding. The resulting PQ curve, approved as SMPTE Standard 2084, replaces gamma for Dolby Vision image encoding. In post-production, this means the image must be graded twice—one time for the standard P3 color space that most cinema viewers will see, and then again in the PQ format that specifies characteristics of the HDR version. Read this 2014 SMPTE presentation by Dolby Labs researcher Scott Miller for the nitty-gritty.

Tomorrowland was graded on DaVinci Resolve at Company 3, where Stephen Nakamura said his goal in the 31.5 foot-lambert Dolby Vision pass was to make sure the picture took advantage of the expanded dynamic range while still retaining the feel of the standard 14 foot-lambert version. He elaborated on the grading process, and the thinking behind some of the creative decisions, in a statement released through Blackmagic.

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Tomorrowland is somewhat brighter and more saturated than real life, but it's not an extreme look, as there are no crushed blacks or clipped highlights. I built a lot of power windows in Resolve to very subtly help smooth out the effects. The movie is full of wild, elaborate visual effects, and there are always some enhancements that we can do in the grade when we see everything projected and in context with the other shots.

[ILM created] a roughly two-minute-long moving shot with an enormous number of elements. I was color grading at ILM while they were building the effects, and I used Resolve's soft clip and highlight tools within Color Match, along with some chroma keys, to increase and decrease saturation from particular portions of the frame.

When converting the files from the traditional D-cinema P3 format into the PQ format, you can make the brightest part of the frame more than twice as bright, and you can get really deep blacks. [Director] Brad [Bird] and [cinematographer] Claudio [Miranda] were interested in taking advantage of this high dynamic range, just in a subtle way. A lot of the Dolby Vision grade was really about re-interpreting the material so it has a wider dynamic range without overpowering anything. For example, a bright part of the frame, like a lamp, wouldn’t completely overpower the actors' faces as it potentially could.

Even though the Dolby Vision pass gave me the potential to let highlights go brighter than anything you'd ever see in traditional D-cinema, I used DaVinci Resolve's soft clip and highlights features a lot to help retain the original feel of the standard 14 foot-lambert version in the Dolby Vision 31.5 foot-lambert version.

—Stephen Nakamura

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If you don't live near a Dolby Cinema, hold on—AMC has signed a long-term deal to upgrade as many as 100 AMC Prime locations to Dolby Cinema over the next nine years. Up next are more theaters in Los Angeles and Houston, as well as New York City, Dallas, Leawood, KS, and Vernon Hills, IL.