The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP014: A Discussion With Dolby's Nate McFarlin Pt. 1

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

We've been Dolby Vision evangelists -speaking, presenting, and developing training on it almost since the very start including a 10-part series for the Dolby Institute a few years ago.  So every time an opportunity presents itself to chat with our friends at Dolby we jump at the chance.  Recently we caught up with Nate McFarlin who is a Senior Content Engineer at Dolby for an engaging two-part conversation.In this episode, we discuss:- Joey & Robbie's passion for Dolby Vision- Nate's engineering background and his time at RIT in the Motion Picture Science program (MPS)- Some of the origins and spread of HDR and Dolby Vision- Understanding Dolby Vision as translation technology (tone mapping)- The explosion of HDR and Dolby Vision content- And much more!In part 2, we'll dive into some more of the technical parts of the Dolby Vision ecosystem as we continue our chat with Nate. 

Hi, and welcome back to the Offset Podcast. This is part one of a two-part series where we'll be talking with Nate McFarlane from Dolby. Over these next two episodes, we'll talk with Nate about his engineering background, his role at Dolby, and of course, we'll be exploring the Dolby Vision ecosystem in detail. Stay tuned. This episode is sponsored by our friends Flanders Scientific, who are leaders in color-accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, editor, DIT, or broadcast engineer,

Flanders Scientific has professional display solutions to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Hey guys, I'm Robbie Carman. And I'm Joey Deanna. And welcome back to another show. And Joey, this week we're talking about something that I think to all of those who have met us, know us, have been unfortunately stuck in a cab with us or something similar, know that we like to talk about a lot,

and I mean a lot, underline that, bold it, exclamation point at the end. And that is Dolby Vision, right? Dolby Vision is a technology platform, a whole deal from the guys at Dolby, and it's often paired with another related technology, which is called Dolby Atmos.

And both of these technologies, I don't know, I think first came to my mind, probably in the 2015-16-ish range, maybe a year or two plus or minus from there. And, you know, at the time, we were just coming off of the PTSD that was stereoscopic 3D projects, right?

And all that entailed. And it was like, oh, finally, we're back to regular, old, boring, SDR television. And then what happened? We got this bug, and we got bit by this thing called Dolby Vision and HDR. And literally for the past eight years, it's not been, you know,

that's all we think about and talk about and do, right? Yeah. And I think, you know, a big part of that is the image quality behind it. Right. We both, I think, kind of saw stereoscopic in television at least as kind of gimmicky. You know, we've talked at length about higher resolutions and frame rates being kind of gimmicky as well, you know, in any. reasonable screen size and viewing distance combination.

A human being can't perceive the difference between, say, UHD or 4K and HD. But I think a lot of people were expecting the next jump in image quality to be analogous to when we went from SD to HD. But even when we went from SD to HD, we didn't really improve colorimetry, overall image quality dynamic range. We just made the resolution bigger. this when hdr came and dalby vision came into our world it was kind of it's it's an entirely new way of encoding transmitting and displaying an image that allows us to have such a higher perceived level of

quality and accuracy that it just both of us got immediately excited by the possibility because you can't look at it and not not be impressed by right yeah if it's your first at this point most people have seen HDR, but everybody when they see HDR for the first time, it's like when they saw HDTV for the first time. It's just that drastic. We use that phrase a lot of better pixels. And I think that, you know, as a catch-all for what HDR and specifically Dolby Vision is doing, I would include Atmos, but that's not pixels, that's soundwaves. But in general, it's better core technology. It's better pixels, better audio. And we used a lot of different analogies

that I'm sure we'll talk about today, but the wide end of the funnel. It's the most bits or whatever you want to throw, wherever you want to say it, it allows you to kind of master at the best possible technical quality and go from there.

And yeah, I mean, right around that time, we got interested in it, and we were lucky enough you and I to both be writers and presenters for a series that the Dolby Institute did. We got hired by the guys at the Dolby Institute

to do a primer on Dolby Vision and this was kind of again the early days of Dolby Vision and we were lucky enough to do that and that was really kind of the bug kind of got planted in us and through that we were able to

obviously carry on to do a bunch of HR projects and we remained close with the guys at Dolby to the point where we'd like to talk to them all the time we're on their podcast, they're now on our podcast and to that end we are very lucky today to have a good

friend and I just say one of the smartest people I know, Nate McFarland from Dolby. Nate, welcome to the Offset Podcast. We're super glad to have you, man. Hey, Robbie, Joey. Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. Can't wait to chat. And we need to hire you guys again.

That was such a great pitch. I don't even talk. I don't think either one of us would say no to that opportunity. So let's make it happen. So Nate is a senior content engineer over at Dolby. he specializes in commercial partnerships, which means that he is talking to the likes of Sony and LG and FSI and Canon and all the partner companies that are out there that are in the general,

you know, kind of the Dolby Vision ecosystem. But I guess, Nate, let's, before we get into all the particulars of, you know, Dolby Vision and, you know, all that kind of stuff, I just want to know who you are, what's your background. How did you get here? What's this path? I mean, because I think that, you know, we are so used to talking about or talking about and talking to people on our end of the industry, right?

The creatives, the button pushers, the people suck in suites. That I think it's, you know, this kind of like what you do and what your team does is kind of like this ambiguous thing, right? It's kind of like, oh, yeah, those are just the guys at Dolby. And we don't really quite understand all of that. And I mean, from talking to you over the years, I know, and some of your colleagues, too, I mean, it's kind of a mix of science and math and technology and customer service and all of that. So just tell us a little bit about yourself and, you know, what you do at Dolby and that kind of stuff. Sure. Yeah. I can give the 20-foot background. So I first kind of became interested in the whole like film industry when honestly I was in like middle school and high school. Right around the time YouTube started to become like a big scene. And I was really into. kind of, you know, like sort of short film, sci-fi stuff.

Like, I'm a big Star Wars nerd. I'm a Trekkie. And I followed a few folks back in the day that would do that sort of, you know. Fan film kind of things. Yeah, absolutely on YouTube. But I always kind of found myself being more interested when they would put out like weeks after the actual film would be released, the kind of behind the scenes, like technical stuff. And I always thought post-production was super cool.

And then I started following people like Freddie W. And video co-pilot, like Andrew Kramer's awesome. and getting really into kind of that side of the fence. And I still remember I think I was like a sophomore junior in high school. And my dad first bought me my first like DSLR. I was so pumped and I would just run around and, you know, shoot little goofy videos with my friends at the time. So when it came time to kind of look for colleges, you know,

initially I was kind of thinking more of that traditional film route. But I was also kind of had a pretty, you know, vested interest in kind of math and science as well as my background. And my father actually worked at a university with this big, tuition exchange a list at the time. And so we would go through all these different schools. And one of the ones that had popped up that actually my brother had visited years past that he didn't end up going to was RIT or Rochester Institute of Technology. And when we were doing some more digging there, they had this really cool kind of groundbreaking on a sleep program called motion picture science, which on paper sounded like the best of both worlds. And so you'll hear me refer to that as MPS going

forward just because it's easier as an acronym. But MPS is really cool. And that, it kind of bridges that creative and technical gap, like you were just talking about Robbie, in the sense that you do get kind of traditional film classes like production, scripting, things like that. But then you also get on the engineering side more of the scientific foundation, things like optics, radiometry, color science, you know, sensor design, all the things that kind of make that film industry tick. And it's kind of been awesome to go through that. And it was a really, really tight-knit group of people. They only left in 15 students every year. And usually by the time you graduate, it's dropped down. So I think in my graduating class, I want to say there's maybe

nine or ten of us. But it's been really cool. It's really kind of a new program. I believe the first graduating class was in 2010 or 11, I believe. And it was started by a couple of X imaging engineers at Kodak, actually, right? So it worked out really well. And it's been really cool since I graduated in 2016, which I'm now realizing is a lot longer ago than if you're like. But it's really cool because in this industry, you know, you guys know, obviously, it's a fairly niche industry compared to a lot of other fields. But it's really awesome to see how often I interact with other RIT grads. I mean, I think we have at least seven or eight of us at Dolby.

I was going to say, I mean, the funny thing about this, Nate, is that like, I feel that everybody that I know that legitimately calls themselves in color scientists, And let's be clear, there's plenty of people who call themselves color scientists who have no normal education about this. But the actual color scientists that I know, they all went to RIT. And they all have this math background and stuff like that. And it's like it's gotten to the point where it's just like if somebody says color scientists, the next thing out of my mouth is, so did you go to RIT?

And almost every time the answer is yes, I went to RIT. And then they know they know you and, you know, Molly Hill and all these colleagues. leagues of years. Oh, yeah, sure, good friends with them, you know? So that small world is it. But like, let me ask you a little bit about that experience because I think this is something that, you know, many of our listeners might not be aware of because I think that traditional film school route, as you, as you mentioned, you know, kind of, whether it be, you know, the writing part of it or the producing part of it or the technical part of like we do as colorists, that's more familiar. But like, I think one of the questions I had was that I was terrible at math in high school, right?

I got like D's and math, but I was good at science, right? I was good like when the math was applied. So like physics, chemistry, that kind of stuff. I was good. To those, you know, maybe some of our younger listeners or, you know, people who have kids that are maybe about to go college age, like is that a barrier to success at a school like RIT? Like, if I am just like a little mathphobic, but I hear it's all about math, like, is there

a place for me there? Like, can I make it in the school like that? Yeah, totally. I mean, RIT definitely. I mean, I won't lie and say that. it's not like an engineering technical focused school. So I think the baseline kind of math prerequisites for the MPS program, for example, were just calc and physics. A lot of that you get, you know, I took both. I took calque as an AP in high school, but then I actually took it again,

just get a refresher during college and the physics, you know, was relatively not too crazy. And you're kind of, the good thing about those are, those are kind of more general elective classes. So you're in a big class and you have a lot of people to kind of help you out with. I'd actually argue that it gets a little more scary when you actually get into like the core things like radiometry, optics, Fourier math type things that sound super scary and rightfully so they are. But it's funny because you'll realize that when you get into the real world, depending on the path you take. Like I can't tell you the last time I thought about Fourier mathematics, right? Like it doesn't, it never enters my brain. And I'm happy.

Well, see, Joey on the other hand, he audits classes at like MIT and stuff with Fourier transforms. and whatnot. Like, didn't you just take a nuclear physics class, Joey, at MIT or something? I did. Well, yes and no. I'll say this slightly off topic, but somewhat on topic, is MIT, not RIT, has a very cool online program where their advanced classes are just given out to the public, and you can download videos of all the lectures, all the assignments, and everything. So if you are looking at getting some science education, that's a cool thing as well. But yeah, I love that stuff. And I was bad at math, too.

My brother is a basically career mathematician, computer scientist at a very, very high level. And he used to always say, still says basically that nobody's actually bad at math. There's just a lot of really, really bad math teachers. Okay. And I kind of believe that because it was never presented to me in a way that got me interested. and now as an adult I'm looking at a lot of things that I find really, really interesting that have mathematical

basis to them and wishing I had learned more fundamental math calculus differential equations stuff like that trigonometry you know I I wish I had taken that much more seriously when I was younger getting that foundational knowledge

because now I'm like well this actually can lead me into some really well that sounds like me like I buy these books right like color science books and like you know i'm thinking like you know charles pointin or you know whatever right and it's like and i get into them and i'm all stoked about them and it's like i get through then i open the book and i realize that like there's only actually about 800 words in the book right the rest of it is just your math and so i i think that you know it's interesting that you had that experience because, you know, I think that one of the scary things for people who admire that level of knowledge is, is the math part about it. And I think that, you know, having come to know

you and some of your colleagues over the years, it's really interesting that like, you know, for the average colorist, it's not about necessarily mastering that math, right? It's more about understanding the higher level version of it, the general flow of it, but nobody's asking us to, you know, go out and win the Fields Medal as a colorist and understand. Yeah, and I think that's a really important distinction to draw is because, like you said, I get into these scientific hobbies of researching this stuff a little bit. And I wouldn't say I can do any of the math. Like if you were to put in front of me formulas to derive and actually figure out usable solutions to measure data and stuff like that, I would be lost.

But if you ask me some of the more fundamental questions of what, what does this represent and why does this happen, I can get a pretty good understanding of it. So there's kind of that gradient there. Yeah, that's very cool. I think that's a really important distinction to make, though, too, is that, like, being creatives that understand that at, like, a very high level is super valuable. And I will say to your point, Robbie, there's like a black hole of knowledge that you could go down,

whereas, like, you know, it's funny because I have, I have, you know, friends that were close colleagues of mine at RIT that I know very well, that are now, like, imaging vision scientists at Apple or Netflix. and we have some, you know, like Jacqueline Pitlarz is one that comes to mind who's like a brilliant, accomplished color scientists and vision researcher on Dolby's staff. And, you know, her level of color science compared to me, even though we went through the same curriculum is like, yeah, all is a difference, right? All these different, you know, focus areas you could go. RIT actually, you know, the only color science I took at RIT was just kind of the required core material,

but they actually have a whole master's and even a Ph.D. program. If you really wanted to go down the rabbit hole of color science, which I have, you know, friends like I think of like Ben Bodner comes to mind and X like LG Apple who did the master's and he's a great and one of the smartest guys I know so it's really kind of a you can choose your own destiny kind of thing with with that degree which I think is really cool I mean we have people that went you know did the scientific MPS bachelor's degree but then still ended up doing you know like creative filmmaking careers right so I'm sure that that technical background is a very good foundation for them absolutely no and that and that was kind of the

whole mantra when we were learning is that like, hey, this is a really tight-knit group, this is a family here. And if you really kind of focus and do the due diligence, like, this is going to set you so far ahead, you know, when you graduate. And it's really cool to see now that companies, you know, source RIT grads very aggressively and to the point now where because so many of us have gone through the curriculum now, now some of the older alums are in hiring positions that will hire straight from RIT, right? So it's kind of, it's been really cool to see that. You know, again, I think I mentioned still. But I last. at how often that I run into RIT grads.

I mean, like, I think of like every time I talk to the Netflix guys, right? Like three out of the four people on their imaging team are RAT grads, right? It's cool to see, yeah. Well, I mean, it's also just very cool to me that background. I mean, obviously I've expressed you before. It's something that I kind of admire. Like, I want more of that in my life. But, you know, the more that I think about it, it's just, it's also, for those, you know,

who might be thinking about going down that path, I think the program that you did and the way that you've described it here and have described it to me in the past is really interesting. because it is that morph of kind of creative and technical. I think about, what's his name, Joseph Slumka, is that it was named? Yeah, PhotoChem. Yeah, a photochem, who's a color scientist. And, you know, just thinking about his interaction with some of the top colorists in the world, right?

And like that back, what those discussions must be like back and forth between him and DPs and Gaffers and him and colorists. And like that creative calibration that exists simultaneously, you know, with the math and the science and all kinds of stuff, is pretty fascinating. So yeah, I mean, I would definitely encourage people to check out the RAT program. So you did RIT, then what happened? Where'd you go after that?

Yeah, sure. So I graduated in 2016. My thesis was actually involved. It was called Resolution Enhancement via display vibration. So my partner, Max, and I thought it would be cool to stick a motor on the back of a display, vibrate it really fast, and run a bunch of psychophysical experiments

to see if it actually could give off the perception of higher resolution. solution, which we joke about nowadays, because that core idea is actually in a lot of products nowadays. It's like, I was going to ask, did it? Yeah, so pixel shift projectors, you might have heard of that. Oh, yeah. Similar concepts.

But yeah, no, that went really well. So senior year was awesome. And then actually both of us got hired together to go to IMAX in L.A. So we worked on their post-production mastering team. So again, when I, you know, went through RIT, I was thinking that, oh, I kind of want to go the more, you know, generic film route, right? and do kind of the whole post-production visual effects. That was still kind of where a lot of my core interests lie.

But with my thesis, I was kind of diving more into like the display technology standpoint. So I worked for IMAX for a year. Did a lot of the mastering for them, got to work on some really cool projects. That was 2016 and 2017. So that was like the year of Rogue One and Dr. Strange, like some really cool movies that came out that we were able to work on there. And then a year later, I actually got my job at Canon. So I was there for four years, but that was really cool.

And that completely shifted my direction from post-production now, more hardware-focused, where things like calibration and instrumentation tuning and repair, like all became very prevalent. And I wanted to trade my time at Canada for the World, got to travel the world, meet some really cool people. And again, to your point earlier, Robbie, it was a lot of this kind of intersection of, you know, how do we best make hardware that meets the creatives needs and being able to kind of talk that talk and have more of the, you know, I joked by the time I left, I felt like I was wearing two hats where I was an engineer by training, but kind of an account manager by necessity, right?

Where I was always going on these like sales calls and demos and got to meet some really awesome people. And then in 21, just after COVID, there was actually a vacancy at Dolby for someone on the commercial partnerships team, which I am on now. And they were looking for someone with display technology, calibration experience. And I remember telling my wife at the time, I'm like, this would be silly for me not to apply. Like it just is such a fit. And yeah, and so I've been here for three years, and I absolutely love it. So what's day-to-day like then for you at Dolby? I mean, obviously you're, you know, just to let everybody know, I got to spend a quality

amount of time with Nate at this past year's NAB. We were both sitting in a, how should we say, extremely small room slash booth. A comfy room. An offshoot from the Flanders Scientific booth. And we're talking about displays and color management and stuff, which was a lot of fun. But like, what's, you know, what's, you know, I know you're trying to. travel a lot. You're at trade shows talking to partners and stuff. But what's your, what's your, you know, your average day at Dolby Lake? What are you doing? Yeah, no, it's a great question.

So I kind of wear multiple hats and it's very similar to how it was at Canon for me actually, where, again, a lot of my background and day-to-day tasks are kind of more engineering related around Dolby Vision support. How does the algorithm work? How can we improve that? Talking to customers, but the core of what we do is support. So again, a lot of training education initiatives. We're constantly building. We're in a really cool spot right now. HDR and Dolevision is growing at like a crazy fast pace and the momentum there is ever increasing. So we're really looking at how can we kind of scale this sort of knowledge that we have. Because again, it is, like you guys said, it's kind of these niche field and set of, you know,

algorithms and things that guide our processes, but just disseminating that information into very digestible things as we continue to scale into new markets like social media and education and all these different intersections. I mean, we have Dolly Vision in cars now, which is just crazy to think about. So we have a lot of cool momentum there, but that requires really, you know, a lot of, you know, differentiation in the way we've done training because, you know, speaking to what you said earlier in the podcast is like, back in 2015, 2016, it was so new that it was all kind of very white glove in the sense that, you know, we would take pulsars around and for those who are not wearing.

Let's let's start there. I mean, I think that's a, it's a good segue into kind of. of like a little bit about the origins of DV where it is currently where it's going because I mean I think there's there's a lot of people believe in or not who are just getting into DV even though it is a little more mature you know it's nurture now uh compared to where it was you know and Joey and I as we as we said when we started off the show you know we got interested in it because um of two things it was kind of like the neck we saw kind of the path of like not this is the next big thing because we saw it and we're like we were floored by it um but you

know, our, we started getting to, I'm trying to remember about this a little bit because it was a while I was back, but I remember, you know, I think I had first heard of bright side technologies, uh, uh, which was research going down this avenue of, you know, looking into HDR displays. And just to be clear, I think that HDR is something for a lot of people that is not new per se. And what I mean by that is, uh, HDRI, HDR imaging has been around for a long time where we take, you know, multiple exposures of something. We merge them together to have kind of the perception. An ugly SDR image. The perception, the perception in a higher dynamic range, but we're still forcing it down

a standard dynamic ramp pipe. And it seems like, you know, initially bright side. And then when Dolby acquired some of that technology and continued on with a lot of the research, which, by the way, I get five bucks for every time I say this. But I think a lot of people think about Dolby as like just like a licensing company. And that's certainly part of your guys' business model. But at their heart, it's a research. and development company, right? And I think that that was, you know, that was really interesting when Brightside was acquired and you guys, you know, had some of this technology now. And the work that went on, I think, you know, from talking to some of your colleagues over the years, you kind of the

mandate was we need to create technologies that better, you know, imitate or replicate the real world viewing experience, right? Like when you go outside and it's a bright sunny day and you're seeing, you know, Chrome coming off a bumper at nine bajillion nits, right? Like, eventually we can get that. And also recognizing that where we've been to date with STR television has been very limited, right? And I remember, you know, this is, when I started getting into this, I remember being at NAB one year, giving some classes at post-production world, which is a big conference. And somebody came up to me and afterwards like, hey, I was just down on the show floor. And I didn't see, you were talking about HDR, but I didn't see any

HDR cameras. When are those coming out? Right? And I kind of like, kind of gave the guy his side eye. And I'm like, they're already out. And he's like, what do you mean? They're already out. I'm like every camera that you record like every, like the camera wars, right? Everybody's, well, we're 15 stops. We're 16 stops. We're all. I'm like, so those cameras have been able to do that for the longest time. Yet HDRs existed in the camera space since the 1800s. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So I started, you know, started starting, started getting, into it and I think I want to start this part of the conversation at something you hinted out at a minute ago is that in 2015, 16, 17 that range there. I got the impression that Dolby Vision

was very, I like to say this in a fun way and hopefully not disparaging way to Dolby, but it was a country club technology. And what I mean by that was that like only the top facilities in the world were doing Dolby Vision or HDR in general because it was. this technology that was very heavily, I don't know what's the word, Joey curated by you guys, I guess, right? And you guys, there was a lot of decisions about who's going to be able to get this and who's going to be able to use it. And I'm thinking of, you know, the photocems, the e-films, the company threes,

you know, all those kind of big-time players, right? What happened? Like, was that a testing ground for Dolby Vision? Like, I'm a little, that's part of the history of Dolby Vision. I'm a little vague on, right? do is that like it sort of makes sense to put this technology in the best hands of the best people in the world but how did it eventually get out to the rider world you know what's what's the history there yeah yeah no great question um and my colleagues tom and abe who are involved from the get go

could probably give a better perspective than i but i i'd actually back it up even a little more than 2015 and say kind of with the advent of pq and i believe if i'm remembering my signature that was 2014 so dolby did a lot of research into you know how the human eye perceives things, like again, you mentioned, you know, almost everything we do is perception-based in the sense that we want things to mimic the human interaction that you perceive in the real world. So I can give you guys some great images for this, but we have these really cool labs in San Francisco that'll measure all sorts of human brainwaves, interactions, things like that when displayed with certain kinds of content. So, you know, an analogy and example we like to show here is like

for HGR, for example, some of the very, very early prototypes of HGR reference displays, like the pulsar and things that we were building at the time where we would sit somebody down in a chair, connect a bunch of brainwave monitoring machines, blast them with really bright content. And one thing that we found, again, is that for a fire, for example, we would show something that was brighter than traditional SDR. And we found that there was actually a very real visceral reaction to people where their skin started to get perspiration and things like that, where they're actually, you know, viscerally reacting as if they're actually getting heat off of this fire, which of course we know is not actually

the case, you know, aside from the heat of the monitor. I'm going to say, with the pulse are, it might be. The false are maybe, but you know what I mean? So a lot of that was done early on. But then it almost became kind of a, okay, we've convinced ourselves, right? But now we have to go show this to the people that are making all of the best content in the world, right? Like all these big pros production studios that you mentioned.

And at the time, again, not only was it a kind of a knowledge gap where anyone outside of Dolby didn't really understand how to do it, but there wasn't a lot of hardware, right? Like HDR reference displays didn't exist at this time. And that's why Dolby said, screw it. We'll do it ourselves. So we'll build one. So we prototyped. There's a display called the Pulsar, which was a behemoth of a display.

There's only, I believe there was only 20 that were made. There's actually only two there are still left in the field from the last time I checked. But really cool display, but required a ton of additional power, 4,000 nits, all this cool stuff. So we would wheel these things around. And when I say wheel, I mean more like Ark of the Covenant. Well, it's really, no, real quick anecdote about that. Back in around that time, I forget the year exactly, but we had our facility, our audio partners had become one of the first places in the country to install, you know, an Atmos suite, right? And so we were, we were good friends with your colleague Tom McAndrew on the audio side of things.

And so they're like, yeah, well, why don't we do Dolby Vision too? And I remember your colleague Tom Graham called and said, hey, we want to do this event at your guys' studio. So here's what we need. I need four 20-amp plugs in your room to plug the pulsar in. And I was like, what? He goes, yeah, I just need four 20-amp plugs, right? Wherever we're going to plug them on. I'm like, I can't.

I don't have that. Sorry, buddy. You know, it did. It was liquid-cooled. Dark of the Covenant. I like that analogy. It's exactly what it was like. It was a behemate.

I mean, it weighs like 300 or 400 pounds. It's a lot. Yeah. Robbie and I have both been in the presence of the pulsar, fortunately for us. and what a cool display. Yeah, it's really cool. And I almost, you know, I think of it as a really good success.

You know, we didn't commercially, you know, manufacture them. And we never really intended it to be that. It kind of served its purpose in the sense that we really wanted to use this display to showcase what HDR could look like. And we were hoping to spur the industry to create better, more streamlined displays and let the companies that are really good at commercial products like Sony, Canon, all these things take over. And, I mean, look at where we are now, just not even tend to.

Totally. I mean, and that's right. I mean, the kind of the, you know, it was, it was a technology demo, I guess, if you will, to show this. I mean, and thinking back on it now, it was very impressive because of its brightness, but it was HD only. The power, the power. It was like super.

Yeah, power draw was not going to get energy certification from anybody. Right. Right. Like, yeah, all sorts of problems with it. So, you know, as, as that started growing, as you started going around to these larger facilities, they started dabbling in, you know, HDR. That's kind of one side of the story, right? But the other side of the story is trying to convince what you do day to day,

is trying to convince partners, right? The Sonys, the FSIs, the cannons, whoever the world, to one part, you know, invest in this technology and kind of make this technology. But the third part of that is also trying to get the content creators, the studios, the Netflix, etc., to also buy in a little bit. And, you know, I know some of that was a little bit before your time at Dolby, but like, in a general sense, can you speak to like, you know, what that, probably that initiative was and kind of how it's developed now? Like, how do those conversations go now when you talk to people about integrating Dolby Vision into their, into their, you know, their workflows? Yeah, no, it's great. Again, a great question. I think a lot of it spurred from, you know, not only the availability of content creation tools like, you know, color correctors that support it, reference

displays that can do HGR, but I think the big breakthroughs also came when it became more available on the playback side, when people at home could see it and realize like, oh, wow, that's way closer to what I saw on the grading suite than was previously right. And I think that was kind of like the big aha moment. And then when you started to get more and more TVOYM signing up and then more OTT platform, signing up, it almost just became natural. And from the creative standpoint, you know, when talking to folks like yourself, I think it became easier when we had more robust ways to show that, you know, it does really, you know, maintain your creative intent. And I think, you know, I don't pretend to play a colorist, but I think, you know, as a creative person, that is something that mantra really speaks

a lot of volume, right? Because I would assume that when you guys spend hours, you know, crafting your vision, you don't want it to go get stretched by all this other crazy crap that you have no control of right at least vision gives you some sense of um you know uh consistent i mean i think also i mean speaking for us personally but i'm curious if you had the same you know prospective visiting places as well like in those early days at doble vision it was freaking complicated right like like you're we were at the time we were working with the external content mapping unit the ECMU right which was a whole separate server hardware server, you know, it was a 1U super micro that's still in a closet over here in the corner, my room right here. We got these CEMU licenses, by the way. I do that. People still have it.

You know, external CMU box that you had to get talking to your color corrector, you had to, you know, dive into command line, you know, very much so the making of Dolby Vision stuff, right? I'm talking about, you know, the deliverables, the XMLs and stuff. Like, that was command line driven, really, through the professional tools. Not a whole lot of color correctors were supporting it in a way. that made it easy to the end color. It almost,

Joey, tell me if you agree with this. Like, it almost seemed in those early days, like you were kind of required to have an engineer on staff to make this stuff work. Yeah,

and I think that does make some sense, you know, given, like you said, they wanted to, you know, the first places that adopted were big advanced facilities that had a little bit more engineering support behind them,

which hopefully kind of leaves the team to Dolby, the flexibility to, collaborate with the engineering side too and figure out the best way to integrate this into post-production and encoding pipelines. I was just going to mention, you know, just to go back a little bit to the issue

of creative intent and accuracy, that to me is one of the greatest things about PQ and W Vision in particular is, yes, in the old SDR days, every consumer playback device was the complete wild, wild west. Now they've gotten so much closer together, I think largely because of Dolby Vision, but even to the point of theatricals,

I will specifically seek out any movie in Dolby Cinema half because I love the HDR and half because I know the projector's been calibrated this century. Sure. You know? But so yeah, Robbie, I think you're absolutely right. The initial user-facing tools for Dolby Vision were very technical, especially, you know,

You couldn't even make screeners, right? We dove into this very deeply, right? We had a license for the Dolby encoding engine software, which is the only way to really make, like, encoded MP4s that could play back on consumer devices. And when we first got this, basically, there's no user interface. It was designed for cloud computing platforms where you would write your own backend to control it.

And that's great for streamers and studios, because they're already doing that with their workflow teams. We actually had to write our own user interface for that to make our own Dolby encodes. And we were one of the first, first, you know, non-major studios to do it. And I remember, Robbie, I told you at the time, I was like, watch, we're putting all this work in, and it's awesome, and we're glad we're doing it.

This will be a button and resolve in two years. And it is now. And I think that's wonderful, because we started out with everything being tested and operated on and figured out at the very highest end and then it kind of evolves, evolves, evolves, evolves, all the kinks get worked out, then it gets more and more presentable to the artist

that doesn't have to have as much of a technical background. Now you can make a very good Dolby Vision encoded screener MP4 right out of DaVinci Resolve without any kind of drama or difficulty. That wasn't always the case, but I think that was the logical approach to do it. Yeah, I agree. And I just, I'm remembering now, Joey, that I was, when I spoke to Nate's colleague, Tom Graham,

who's a good friend of ours, and he had called and said, hey, do you want to try this? I saw you, I had written him about, like, how do I create a Dolby Vision MP4 to give to a client? He's like, well, you could try out this software, but like good luck, basically. I think initially when he gave us,

you know, when we got the license and we got the package you install, I think he was like, we'll see you in a couple years when you figured it out, right? And honestly, if it hadn't been for Joey, like in his computing knowledge and compiling knowledge and all that kind of stuff, it would have never happened. But it was kind of a little bit of defeat because, I mean, for a period of like 18 months, like, Joey was literally the smartest guy on the planet outside of like the, you know, the Netflix and the Amazon, you know, pipelines in the world because he had done this on a computer in his basement and it was making, you know, it was a little. little deflating when it was like, oh yeah, that's just the one button now in resolve. But that's a natural- I welcomed it. That's a natural evolution, I suppose. So, you know, I think, you know, we've covered a little bit of this. It makes a lot of sense that we started kind of at the high end,

you know, worked out the kinks. It's slowly filtered. And I remember kind of the very first, sort of milestone point that this was going to be a bigger, wider thing for me was, you know, DaVincior-Rosolve over the past decade or so has grown from this multi-100,000-dollar system into essentially, essentially a free system. There's a free version of it, right? But DaVinci Resolve Studio at, whatever it is, 300 bucks, 400 bucks. I remember when the announcement came out that Dolby Vision was going to be natively supported in DaVinci Resolve Studio without any additional cost, meaning that you could make a compatible, say, Dolby Vision IMF with the free version of Resolve. And if you needed additional creative control, you could purchase a trim license, which gives you

you still can, by the way, still purchase that, gives you some additional creative control by enabling the trim controls in Resolve Studio. But when I saw that, I was like, well, now here we are, right? We've gone through trial by fire at the biggest places in the world, and now we have what is,

I would have to guess, the most widespread color correction system and use in the world, now offering this for free. From your guy's perspective, at that point, if you can kind of remember back or think back or whatever, like, has it been an explosion of content?

since kind of, you know, that point in time, it seems like it has to me anyway. Yeah, totally. I mean, you've mentioned Tom several times already, but he has really great slides that he shows every time we do open houses and things like that where the momentum is just, it's really exploding. Obviously, some big milestones, like you mentioned, on the creative side, but then also adoption from the OTT platforms embracing it as the go-to-HDR format. And then, you know, again, our catalog of playback devices that are supporting it, and it always

blows my mind even as someone who works here and interfaces with the... this stuff every day. It's just like the intersection now between all these different mediums for playback is so exciting. And I think that's again akin to all the research that we did up front. It's like, you know, if you think of back in the day, it was like you watch stuff on like lamp-based projectures or CRTs at home, right? And now it's like you have OLEDs, LCDs, you know, dual layer, single-layer LCDs. And it's like so many different backlight technologies, but then so many different, you know, formats of like my phone, tablets, tablets, desktop PCs, like, giant TVs LED walls like it almost like begged for this kind of format right where it's like

there's there's way too much going on like we need some sort of like hero set of pixels if you will to guide all of this together to form the creative vision in a way that is most you know akin to that initial intent and I think that's again part of the reason why we've seen a lot of success is because as that landscape evolves it almost you know beckons for this sort of kind of control from the creative side um so to your point yeah the momentum has been really awesome to see I mean I I like sharing slides when I do my trainings. And even since I've joined in a few years, I think we were under 20,000 titles globally. And now we're well over 25.

I think we're actually closer to 30 the last time I checked the numbers. So it's been really cool to see that and kind of get people like yourselves and others more directly involved is always really gratifying. And again, making. Yeah. I mean, it's also interesting to me. It's, you know, you hinted on this, but it's also, I think a good demarcation point for when a technology. is succeeding is when it's literally in the hands of everybody, right? And what I mean by that is that, like, to me, in the past five, six, seven years,

the biggest endorsement of Dolby Vision in general was an iPhone or Android, whatever, putting DV on mobile devices. Pretty much everybody in the world has some flavor of a mobile phone. Many of them new can support Dolby Vision content. And I think that's an exciting part about it. And it's like, when I think of Dolby Vision in general, the way that I like to describe it to those who are uninitiated is it's a translation tool, right? It allows you to get similar experiences no matter the medium that you're viewing content on, right? Whether that be a 4,000-knit mastering display or whether that be your 300-knit, you know, TV that you bought from,

Costco that's in your bedroom, right? Like, it doesn't matter. DV allows you to go between all of those kind of world, seamlessly getting a similar creative intent and a similar experience. Whereas we've talked about it. Like, it's just, you know, before it's like, well, this TV's bright, that TV is dark. This is unsaturated.

That's desaturated. And it's funny. You look at the SDR grading kind of world right now. And if you look at any user group, at any Facebook thing anywhere, all anyone ever talks about is I open up my file in three different players and I pixel peep and it looks kind of wrong here and kind of wrong here and people keep saying stupid things

like gamma shift and other made up things that nobody ever figured this out for SDR on the software side and the playback side, right? It was never, ever even anywhere remotely solved with SDR and with HDR and Dahlby Vision it is just miles ahead in terms of uniformity of creative intent and display across a wide variety of playback, software, platforms, streaming services, devices all across the board. And that, I think, as a colorist, that's the most exciting part besides just that it looks awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot about the idea of like a closed loop ecosystem, right, where like essentially now we have a situation where, like, essentially now we have a situation where,

a colorist, a DP, and a producer or whatever, sitting in a suite in Los Angeles making a big, you know, Disney Plus or Amazon show or whatever, they look at it and they go, okay, cool. Well, if we do our job right and produce this WVision metadata and the master content correctly, that we can then give that to whoever. And then when they push it out to the TV, it's actually the content telling the TV what to do and how to perform, right, and how to behave, that kind of closes.

that loop back to the mastering suite where it's like we we now content creators now have a fighting chance that their content that they make and they've spent you know blood sweat and tears and millions of dollars on it's going to have a fighting chance of looking the way that they wanted to when it ends up on you know joe smith's tv at home right and i i think that's the first time that's really ever happened which is super exciting 100% and i think you guys both just spoke about great points um a couple misconceptions that we hear all the time is like, hey, will my $400 Dolby Vision TV make my TV look like a $30,000 reference monitor? And it's always like, no, but again, what that handshake is doing is that it's

giving you confidence that that display will, you know, playback that content as good as it can physically limited. Well, that's, that's why I said translation earlier, right? Is that like, and I think it's one of the the one thing, you know, we can get geeky about this for a second because translation another way of saying that is a tone mapping, right? And, you know, tone mapping is essentially, you know, getting the performance and display characteristics of one set of content or one display and translating that over to another display, right? So if you have, you know, a 4,000-knit rec 2020 master, how is that going to look on a 500-knit, you know, PQ-enabled television that you got at Costco? That's that translation, that tone mapping, to get it to that performance.

And yes, there are sacrifices. You're not going to make your $300 TV look like a $30,000. reference monitor, but for the first time you have a fighting chance of getting it close, right, which I think is... Perceptually close. Perceptually close, yeah. And you also say, right, is that, you know, part of the thing that makes us, you know, all of this possible is that we have, you know, these great kits and these great engineers and

scientists at Dolby that are working with all of our partners to make sure that, you know, you have to go through testing to do Dolby Vision integration and it's a proprietary ecosystem, which, again, for those who are, you know, less educated on the display side, for SDR, for example, every TV OEM has their own flavor of SDR. Like, yes, there is filmmaker mode and other things that help tremendously, but every manufacturer has their own special sauce, right? And it's very similar on the camera side where it's like people would say all the time when I was like, oh, I love canon's colorimetry.

Like I love the skin tones that I get on a canon versus. Color imagery should be colorimetry, right? Right, right. And again, that's where this kind of, you know, I like your analogy of closed loop is because we're trying to get rid of all of that and make it just, again, as close as you can perceptually to what you did in the mastering suite. And the cool thing here is that I think, you know, if you look at historically, I think we're as close as we've ever been as a unification.

And it's only going to get better and better, which is. And I'll say this. I've done some pretty extensive testing on a wide variety of obviously professional mastering displays, really good consumer displays down to, I won't say bad, but I will say lower cost consumer displays. And just like you said, with SDR, the display does. does whatever the marketing people and the engineers at the TV company thought looked the best, right? It will do that to your image.

And that makes sense, right, to think about it. Like, if you think about it from the OEM standpoint, because it's like, I want to differentiate myself. Yeah. You know, Sony. They also, and what I think a lot of people don't realize is these TVs also do the same thing with just straight PQ content or HDR10 content, right? They have a PQ image of 1,000 nits or 4,000 nits or whatever. They need to display it at their native 3.3.

300, 400 nits. They will tone map that. However, that TV feels like doing it with their own algorithm that will have whatever sauce that they like the best in it. And I'll, you know, when it goes through the Dolby testing process to have the Dolby Vision technology in it, that mapping is dictated by the Dolby Vision standard and by the actual metadata encoded in the master. I've done A, B testing of the same content.

straight PQ on lower cost consumer displays versus with Dolby Vision metadata and it's night and day. Like you might not see a drastic difference. You probably won't see any difference showing a thousand knit PQ image in Dolby Vision and at a thousand nits on a thousand knit capable TV because it's not doing any work. Right. But then you take that to a lower cost display device that only does three or 400 nits. That closed loop that we're talking about, I mean, it is. drastically better.

Yeah, like, yeah, I agree. I agree. Night and day. Like, I would, I would rather watch straight SDR than most consumer TV's PQ mapping that they do without Dolby Vision. The, the closed loop aspect of this ecosystem, I think, is completely key. Yeah, I agree. I think just drawing attention to that is important to. I know, Robbie, like, you've seen some of the data that I've shown at NAB and some of our other trainings.

There's a great site, Ardains.com. If you're ever curious about this, they do really. extensive TV testing, but they'll actually provide numbers of what luminance levels these certain TV sets are stretching SDR too. And it's, it's crazy to look at some of the times. Because again, you think of SDR and your guys's world, that's 100 nits, right? And, you know, some of these TVs was like thousand nits plus, right? Yeah. Literally. And from a filmmaker's point of view, again, like, I don't pretend to, you know, live in your guys's world, but like, if that were me, that would be my worst nightmare, right? Because it's like I spent all this time.

And now I have almost no control, whereas like this, to your point, Joey's like, at least now you have a chance or you know faith that when you go from all these different mediums that we were talking about not only like form factor but different manufacturers it's going to be a lot more consistent than it would if you just left it up to them well guys this conversation has been awesome so far but i'm looking at my notes here and we still have a lot of things that we want to chat with nate about so i think what we should do is stop and make this a part one and we'll pick up with a part two in a couple weeks, so stay tuned for that. As always, I want to thank our sponsor, Flanders Scientific, without you guys, the show would not be possible. And I also want to thank Stella, our editor,

who makes Joey and I sound intelligible. Stella, as always, thanks for your help. And of course, if you're checking the show out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you find it, please like and subscribe to the show. Every like and every subscribe really helps us get the word out about the Offset Podcast. But for now, thanks for watching.