The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP015: A Discussion With Dolby's Nate McFarlin Pt. 2

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

In this episode, we continue our conversation with Nate McFarlin - Senior Content Engineer at Dolby.  If you missed part 1 of this conversation, be sure to check out Episode 14 to learn more about Nate's background and how he arrived at Dolby.  In Part 2 we cover a lot of ground with Nate including:- Professional & consumer display considerations for HDR & Dolby Vision- Clearing up common misconceptions about display certification (i.e. Dolby doesn't certify displays)- Display performance criteria from Dolby- The pitfalls of using consumer displays for HDR mastering- The move to individual Dolby Vision certifications vs facility certifications- HDR first and SDR to HDR workflows- The evolution of Dolby Vision analysis- Dolby Vision education resources & knowledgebase- And much more!Big thanks to Nate for joining us for these great conversations!

Hey there, welcome back to another installment of the Offset Podcast. And today, we're picking up where we left off with Nate McFarlane from Dolby talking about Dolby Vision. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional videos. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. All right, guys, we're back at it. If you watch part one of this little mini-series on Dolby Vision, you'll know that we had a good time talking with Nate. And so much so that we actually went a little too long than where we actually like to be for most episodes.

So we are picking this up with part two. Guys, let's get back to it. I want to talk a little bit about the professional side of this. And I also want to talk about the consumer side. And then we can wrap up talking about education and getting, you know, the initiatives that Dolby is doing to get people more up to speed about this stuff. But, you know, one of the things that I encounter, I'm sure, Joey, you do too all the time is when it comes to the professional display side of things, right, what we refer to as the reference monitoring land, I think there's a lot of confusion about what Dolby's role in the professional monitoring landscape is like, right? Because you hear people all the time go, well, is it a Dolby certified monitor, right? Or, well, you know, does it does that professional monitoring landscape is like? You know, does it, does that professional monitoring? monitor do Dolby Vision. And there's a lot of myths, especially, I'm not, there's a lot of myths on the consumer side, but there's a lot of myths also that pervasive on the professional

side. And I want to just kind of get your take on them, kind of out of the horse's mouth, because this is where you spend a lot of your time is validating a lot of these displays and technologies. Like, what makes a Dolby Vision mastering monitor? And is there such a thing as a Dolby certified display? Yeah, no, great question. And again, to your point, I answer this. This This is probably a question I get at least once or twice a week. So this is also very well-timed for something we had published yesterday. So I love that you brought this up. So right off the gate,

Dolby does not certify displays for content creation. So anytime that you go to Best Buy or Costco or wherever you buy your TVs and you see a Dolby Vision or Imos logo on the box, what that means is that particular panel or set of speakers or whatever has licensed art technology to do proper decoding of Dolby Vision metadata and to be able to do tone mapping. Tone mapping as a process, as a technology in the content creation space should never be part of the equation. A thing. It's not a thing. When you're looking at a reference monitor, this should be a golden reference, right, of what the true image signal looks like, thus the name reference monitor.

So again, there's no metadata involved when you're just creating your content. That's completely metadata agnostic, doesn't involve anything. That being said, Dolby has a vested interest in the display and HGR ecosystem in the sense that we obviously want the best, most accurate highest quality, HDR, Dolie Vision experience is out there. So like we did with the Pulsar to show the world what it could be, we do engage very regularly. Again, one of the biggest parts of my job

is to talk to all these different reference display OEMs and to be constantly talking to them about what are people saying in the field, what are we looking at, what's good ideas for our roadmap, what sort of features and image quality benchmark should we be striving for. And that's really cool.

I mean, that's one of my favorite parts of my jobs. I get to play with a lot of cool toys. I have like 20 displays in my room at any given time, which is really awesome. But again, in the past, it was a little difficult because, you know, again, we would get these questions all the time of like, hey, you guys made the Pulsar. Are you guys making another Pulsar? Is there another Pulsar coming? You know, are you going to be certifying displays? And it got a little complicated for us.

And we kind of always had this Switzerland stance where it's, you know, we can't recommend any specific displays. We don't have a published list. And up until literally, yes. yesterday, our stances on this were very vague in the sense that we would say, hey, for doing Dolby Vision work, we always recommend that you use the highest quality display device possible, but ultimately it's at the discretion of your client, right? So if your client is happy with, you know, the HDR grade you're making on your iPhone, that's obviously that doesn't exist, but just to be dramatic, you know, good for you.

As long as they're happy, you're good. But that created a lot of problems, right? When people were going to pick monitors because Dolby is seen as such a thought leader, rightfully so in the HGR ecosystem. people turn to us to look for our blessing and our guidance. I actually experienced this firsthand at my time at Canon. A lot of our HGR displays, we would get a lot of Dolby Vision work in the early days. So we said, hey, Dolby, how do we tell people that our display meets the requirements to do Dolby Vision.

And back then, again, the guidances were equally vague. And at the time, we used diction like, hey, this monitor meets the requirements for Dolby Vision certified facilities. And they gave you a thumbs up. But there was no formal certification. There wasn't like a testing process or whatever. So one of the things that I've been working on in the last several months is working with a lot of our really talented teams, you know, internally and a lot of our great partners externally to create what we released yesterday. We published on our knowledge base. It's called the Bilbe Vision HGR display evaluation guideline.

And so what this does is it outlines two different tiers that follow loosely the EBU guidance in 3320, if you're familiar with grade one, grade one B display. and kind of outlines what you should expect performance-wise from these two tiers. And then I also made a whole set of test criteria and procedures that go over what sort of testing parameters you should be looking at when you're doing evaluations, what sort of patches you should be using, how you should be doing the measurements and the calculations, things like that. And again, just to be clear, this is not a certification. This is an education initiative to make people. It's a set of guidelines for how to evaluate monitor.

Exactly. And, you know, that's in the 24 hours it has been. live. It's been really cool to see people are really jumping on this. And I'll shoot you guys a link, of course. But that's kind of how we are viewing things on the content creation side, you know, but again, on the playback side, it's totally different. You do have to have like a Dolby Vision chip and things. But that could, you know, that point of confusion is super, super common. And I totally understand. Well, here's a, here's another thing to clarify for everybody out there. So years ago, I was super stoked to get the little, you know, little package of the badge that said,

you are a certified facility. You are a Dolby. You have one. Right. Right. There you go. Right. And I remember your colleagues came to the shop.

They looked at the monitor. Okay, you got the ECMU and the rack over there. Okay. You know, they did all this checking behind things, make sure everything was plugged in right, the right way. And I got this Dolby certified facility thing. And I think there's a little confusion about that now because you guys have changed the stance on that a little bit over the past couple years,

kind of more moving to the individual, having the onus as somebody who's certified rather than the facility, correct? Absolutely, yeah. No, you hit the nail on the head there. And it's kind of a multifaceted reason why we had to do that. The first was just bandwidth of our engineers. And that's, you know, a good problem to have in the sense that the momentum of vision and creation was so, you know, fastly growing that we couldn't really afford to be sending

our engineers all over the world to, you know, meticulously. Whatever, everybody shop every day. Yeah, yeah, sure. We also found that people were trying to kind of like cheat this. system, and I think I've told you this story in the past, but we would find that we would go into a place, and part of the thing that we would check is the monitor, and we would find that a lot of times people would kind of like swap their, you know, desktop monitor or whatever they were using with... Or an X300 for the day or something like that, right? And so we would give them the thumbs up, we would leave, and then, you know, Netflix or whoever QC would call us, like weeks later and be like, don't be what the hell is going on, like, what's up with these people? So it didn't really make sense for us in kind of the whole scaling sense of the sense of that.

things. So like you said, Robbie, we've now switched to individual certification where if you take our certification test, pass it, you get listed as a Dolby Vision, you know, certified individual, and you go on a big list on our website that's really great because, you know, for people that are doing freelance or things like that, all these. Bouncing from facility to facility or whatever they get. Right. Yeah, yeah. Totally. So I think that's been really well received. And it's been working a lot better for us, frankly, as this has continued to scale. Another, another thing I want your opinion on related to this is that and joey and i have been outspoken voices about this but it would be good to get your perspective on it because you're dealing with this and the consumers and the oems and stuff every day

and that is this is that we hear so often from people that no dude i don't need this reference monitor i don't need to spend 20 grand 30 grand or whatever on a reference monitor everybody's watching hdr on a consumer set anyway you know insert lg or whatever, I can just use one of those for reference monitors. And I know that you know the answer to why this is not, but I just want confirmation that we are not incorrect in saying that a reference monitor you should be seeing everything. And on some of these display technologies, you're not. Is that an oversimplification of it?

I guess a better way of asking it is kind of what's your guy's stance on using consumer displays like any LGO letter similar for mass. Obviously, it can be done, but it's not something I'm imagining as recommended by Dolby for the mastering process. Yeah, no, great question again. So our stance on this has actually kind of changed. If you would have asked Tom or anybody, you know, four or five, six years ago, it would be absolutely not. Like in no situation should you ever be using this. But the reality is kind of change in the sense that, first of all, the TVs are getting a lot better.

We're getting to a point where consumer technology is actually rivaling and actually, you know, outpassing some of the more reference level imagery that we're seeing on the reference displays nowadays. But it does come with a lot of caveats. So one of the hardest things, you know, whenever you're doing sort of content creation mastering is, again, making sure that you're really displaying, playing back a true reference, you know, copy of that signal that's coming off of the SDI or HMI, wherever you got it from. The problem with TVs is that there's a lot of image processing that goes on. So you have things like auto bright mislimiting, dynamic contrast, true motion,

all this gross crap that all everybody, Tom Cruise tells you to turn off when you're watching TVs, right? And for the uninitiated who don't know about that, that's really difficult to control. And a lot of these OEMs, frankly, make it fairly, well, I think the bigger, scarier, two big scary ones for me. And I get your voice on this. The one that Joey's always talking about is color volume limitations on some of these display technologies, right? It's particularly the WRGB OLEDs and then the way that they're, They're driven. But then the other thing that drives me crazy is that so you might have a display that

can do whatever mastering level nits, you know, 1,000 nits plus or whatever, does, you know, an awesome perfect B3. But there's sometimes not a way to turn off any of that tone mapping action that goes on in those TVs, right? So like, instead of clipping at a thousand nits, all of a sudden, you're engaging tone mapping. So you're cool. Everything's great up to wherever, whatever that point of that TV's performance is. And then all of a sudden, this tone mapping kicks in that you can't control, you can't turn off.

So instead of clipping and showing you that clip signal, it's showing you this beautifully rolled off, nice looking highlight that you're like, yeah, look, see, I'm a master at this looks great. And then you look at it in a reference monitor, and in the case of what Joey's always rifling about, now your highlights are now, you know, neon pink or something. And what I'm talking about is you look at a reference monitor, now everything is clip to hell because you're pushing it, you're pushing against that tone. Right? I mean, those are real dangers. Totally. That's a perfectly valid argument. You know, volumetric collapse totally exists. There's another thing now where a lot of the newer TVs will do highlight roll off, which again, for playback looks very aesthetically pleasing, right?

But for a reference monitor and for you guys in creation, it's like, I want my craft to clip. Like, I want it to see it where it break. Yeah, I mean, we've talked a lot today about that closed loop ecosystem, right? if you're not looking at a reference quality output of your work to the actual standard, everything after that is now compromised, right? Because everything else in the pipeline, down to the consumer TV, assumes you mastered this to the standard.

Right. 100%. I mean, I talk to people all the time about calibration principles and durations and how often should I be calibrated and should I be calibrating everything. And it's like if nothing else, you have to make sure that the display you're mastering on is calibrated, right? Because then, like you said, that's now one variable that's permeating down the chain of incorrectness, like, exponentially, right? I do want to point out, too, on the TV side, it's like not only do you run into those issues, but just from like a very basic, like user experience setup-wise, it's like, think about a reference display, picture profiles versus a TV, right? Like a reference display, I can program exactly to 709, P3, 2020, whatever flavor of gamma.

change my data levels versus video levels or whatever. What do you have on TVs? You have like bright mode, like cinema mode, game mode, vivid mode. And it's like how does this correlate to standards? Like that translation is not clear. I will say that the TV OEMs are getting better in this and offering like professional modes and things like this. But it's still kind of the Wild West. And to your point, Robbie, it's like, yes, in a perfect world where you know exactly what you're doing and how to disable all these different settings and you've calibrated them meticulously, which,

There are very calibrateable nowadays, which is great. It's still a lot of additional variables that just frankly don't exist on the reference side. Even as something as simple as like, how do you get my damn signal to the monitor, right? Like if you're coming in an SDI world, you need a converter now, and that's adding another set of variables. Another thing that could break, right? So, again, we don't have kind of any official take. I just, the caveat I would say is that what I tell people often, and again, this is another question I probably get weekly, but just be very aware of the shortcomings of whatever. display you're doing. And whether it's a TV or reference display, whatever technology, they all

have pros and cons. And you just need to think about, will this work for my system, what I'm doing? Like, you know, for example, someone who maybe does primarily SDR work, who occasionally dowels in HDR, but they never really go super high. Like maybe their client likes it to be relatively conservative. You know, maybe you don't need a thousand minutes, right? So it's all relative to what the client and your work needs. Two last things in this regard. And then we'll wrap this up. I wanted to ask you a little bit about just kind of overview of kind of some workflow stuff. And what I mean by that is that for years, at least I feel like I was indoctrinated that the Dolby way, right? The right way to do this is to start out with, you know, an HDR grade first and derive everything that you

need from that master grade, right? When we first started talking today, I called that the wide end of the funnel, right? And I think obviously you guys still promote that as, you know, a great way of working, a preferred way of working as, hey, you know, we can master once and deliver many kind of kind of thing, right, which makes a total sense. But the reality is that, especially in kind of like the great middle, what I refer to, you know, there's the high end, there's a low end, and there's the big middle. I think a lot of that content is, is not necessarily known where it's going to go, how it's going to go. So we end up with projects all the time that, you know, Hey, we did an SDR version of this, but hey, wait, we need an Adobe Vision version of this now, right?

So we're not going to reinvent the grade. We're going to flip it over to HDR and sprinkle some HDRness on top, right? And I know related, there's some new workflows that you guys have been getting into, for example, cinema trims being able to go to do cinema stuff. I imagine you're already starting to look at immersive stuff like, you know, Apple Vision kind of stuff and how that's all going to work. Yep. But in general, like, I think you guys, it feels like you guys have kind of, I don't want to say, being a little less dogmatic about your approaches about these, but can you speak to a little bit

about specifically about that SDR up to HDR kind of workflow? And if that's something that you're seeing more and more of and if it's, I guess, okay by you guys, if you will. Yeah, no, that's, again, great question. It's kind of a mixed bag. And the SDR world is tough because, frankly, you're dealing with people. that have been working in this SDR legacy, if you will, for, you know, the standards have been around for like 50 years, right? And a lot of it is, and we talked a lot about education at the beginning of

the podcast where you go to film school, everything is thought and taught in SDR world. And a lot of the time, there's, this still exists even to this day where a lot of DPs and producers, people are not thinking about HDR on set. They're not thinking about lighting for HDR, shooting for HDR. And that creates a lot of complications because, again, you've established this hero look. on set, right? But then you go into post-production, and then if the first thing you're looking at is HDR, I think for a lot of people, that's jarring, right? You're like, whoa, what the hell? Like, this isn't what I saw on set or this isn't what we were looking at at the editing bay, because, again, most editing is still doing SDR, right? So I think it's, it's understandably jarring and a big

kind of dynamic shift for a lot of people. You know, for the best results, I think we absolutely are still advocating starting with HDR. I really love your funnel analogy. I think that's a perfect way to do it. because again, you're not compromising anything when you're starting at the widest end of the funnel. But again, for people that are used to working in STR, it makes total sense that they would be hesitant or prefer to do it in that way. We do have approaches. You know, there's new things that Tom and others have talked about at some trade shows and our webinars and things like we have. There's a lot of cool options now to do up conversions from SDR. Think of like colorfront and these other sort of algorithms that have the built in.

And I think that that makes a lot of sense for more specific use. cases, think of like older archival pieces, places that maybe don't have the budget to do like a full color grade. I think that there's a lot of places where that makes sense. It's just, again, when you're thinking about like the high end, it just, it always really should be, like having a professional color is doing the HDR pass and your SDR pass should be, you know, what you strive to be doing. I think the algorithms to do this sort of, you know, up mapping are great. But again, for, you know, to get the most out of Bane for your buck, you'd always be wanting to actually have somebody pushing those knobs or turning those, you know, things to themselves.

I agree. And I think one thing I'm related to that front is something that I know Joey and I have been very excited about is it seems like, and please don't take this the wrong way, it seems like for years, Dolby was like, our algorithms, perfect. What are you talking about? It's your guy's fault, right? And certainly not true. I know, but you know, you hear a lot of people, you know, pontificating on, well, I had to do a lot of trims on this particular piece of content because it was dark or whatever. And they'd insert different problems that they were having with some of the algorithms. One of the things I've appreciated from you guys recently is that, you know, yes, you got the technology out in the world, but it's still ongoing, right? And I think the most obvious

thing for me about that is, you know, the cinnamon trims and stuff we just mentioned, but also some of the new analysis options that are available in some of the tools like resolve. Can you speak just for a little bit to what those different analysis options are and where they came about from, you know, how they developed? Yeah, yeah. Awesome. So a couple of years ago, we brought on a new product manager, Sam Billido, and Sam is, if you've ever got the chance to meet him, he's probably the most educated and technically minded, creative person I've ever met. He's, he really understands everything and he comes from kind of that creative background, which I think serves him super well in his role of

Dolby because he kind of talks the talk and understands what a lot of the creatives are asking for. So he came in a couple years ago and kind of ripped the hood off, if you will, of the Dolby Vision algorithm car and said, like, where are all the broken pieces? Like what can we do to fix a lot of this? Everything from how the algorithm is optimized to certain, you know, things that it was potentially over-optimizing for or over-emphasizing as far as, you know, one of the, complaints you'd hear often is like my derived sDR is way too dark um and you know frankly the reason that was happening is because the algorithm was placing too much weight on tiny little spec you would have you know think of like in my camera set up right this light in the background maybe is

super bright and but the relative APL and the scene is you know so it biased the rest of the analysis just because of that bright light right so the analysis would say oh i see this highlight i need to maintain this highlight at whatever cost and to do that perceptually what do you do you darken the the rest of the image to maintain that relationship, right? So, you know, a few months ago, we introduced the new analysis tuning that's live and resolve, base light, and all of our supported color correctors. And this gives you essentially not only the new L1 analysis where it's just much more accurate in the way that it's, you know, creating the metadata, but then also lets the user specify

the strength of, you know, the tuning that it wants to do. We found that this is getting really, really positive reviews so far. I know you guys have gotten a chance to play with it. it, but I think the thing that's been really gratifying to here on our end is, like, a lot of colors say, hey, the derived SDR is in a much better starting place. I'm having to do less trims. And frankly, like, you guys are creatives. We don't want the Dolby Vision process to feel like a creative process. Like, this should be just a packaging thing, right? Yeah, get it out of just. Just to add to that, I think of this, this, this goes hand in hand with what we've been

talking about all along is this democratization and trickle down of Dolby Vision from the very highest end. I think we're seeing some more of the challenges in analysis and tone mapping and stuff as Dolby Vision gets applied to maybe not say worse, but lower and lower quality images. You know, I think the derived SDR of something that had a major Hollywood DP, perfect color grade, everything lit amazingly on set is going to be a lot easier to get right than a run and gun reality show. And in the early days, people weren't doing running gun reality shows and Dalby Vision. Now, even the reality shows can benefit from Dalby Vision. And it's great to see the algorithm kind of evolved to fit more of these more content into what it can do. Yeah, totally.

Absolutely. Like our biggest thing is like we, again, we don't want this to feel like a chore. We want this to feel like, hey, I do this because it makes sense and gives me the best consistency across the playback side of the fence. And that's kind of where our thoughts been and Robbie, I appreciated your sentiment earlier of where this is this, these sort of conversations like things we're doing right now and just talking with everybody in the industry. Like that's vital to the success of our, you know, analysis and our, you know, format, frankly, because we want all of you guys to succeed. Like, the more Dolavision stuff that's out there is the better for us. And if we can make your lives easier, that's something that we're always investigating in. And again, at the

same time, like all these other OEMs are developing their own algorithms and things like this. So, like, the landscape is changing. And we really want to be on the forefront of making sure that we're delivering on what is important to the creatives. And it's gratifying as, as a colorist to see. that you guys are adapting to kind of the language and semantics of HDR in general, right? And we've talked to, you know, Joey and I have talked a lot over the years about kind of the language of HDR, you know, and, you know, early on, it was very geared towards just cranking it, right? See what we can do and, you know, put it in your face, everything turned to 11, you know, and now where, because it's in more genres, it's in more, it's in more, uh, different

flavors of content that have different needs. We're seeing that language develop and it's great to see that language developing side by side with your guys acknowledgement of different people need different things for how they're going to work this. I understand. You just talked on a point too, Robbie, that, you know, this is another, like, this is probably the biggest misconception we get actually and we actually teach us a lot in our trainings because this comes up so often.

It's like a lot of people looking outside in and say, oh, Dolby and all these big studios just want you to make super bright, super punchy, colorful shows. And that couldn't be further from the truth. And the analogy that we like to say Adobe is that HDR and Dolby Vision, we're just giving you a bigger canvas to paint your picture. And ultimately, it's up to you as the creative to decide how to use it or if you want to use it. We did a podcast. Our last episode we had was coming out, I guess, in a couple days from this recording,

is we did an episode on common color grading myths and kind of myth busting some of these. And one of them was we were talking a little bit about P3 grading for cinema right and everybody kind of feels this compulsive need to do like a dedicated p3 pass just because it's a it's a bigger space and then you look at their original sDR and they're not even like anywhere near the boundaries of seven or nine why are they going all the way to the boundaries of p3 and i kind of feel that to to kind of reiterate what you just said that that that coloring box is there but you're under no requirements to push the limits of it right like you don't have to go to the edge of p3 or 2020 You don't have to go right up to your mastering level.

You don't have to have an APL that is at whatever, you know, 700 nits the whole show. And in fact, I just think that that is, unfortunately, I think those early days of HDR biased a lot of creative people against HDR because it looked so different and so starkly different to where now I feel like, okay, look, all the big shows that are like all the, you know, Star Wars stuff on Disney. is a great example, right? You look at that stuff, and yeah, there's some HDRness when it needs to be a control panel or, you know, whatever, you know, cool sun or something like that. But what, 96% of it exists in SDR land and it's sprinkled on, like, so that's, that language is, I guess, is what I'm trying to say is developing. And it's good that creatives are finally kind of getting that.

Because I think, again, the early tendencies were just to push it. And now we're seeing a lot of different approaches. See, now I won't even get out of bed for anything under. 2,500, 3,000 nits personally. But I'm just kidding. But I'll say this. Any amount of aggressive or non-aggressive HDR grading can still benefit from the amazing technology

as a distribution and packaging system that Dolby Vision offers, right? Let's say if you did an HDR grade that only ever got to 200 nets, it's still going to look better on more consumer devices going through Dolby Vision distribution than it would be going through a traditional SDR pipeline. 100%. Well, let's wrap here up here by something I think is really important and obviously something as educators near and dear to Joey and I's heart as we started talking off the show. We were fortunate enough years ago to do some education stuff with you guys to kind of talk about in the early days of Dolby Vision. But since then, it seems like the education side of Dolby's

push into both Atmos and Vision has really been going. strong. Can you speak a little bit to, I know we mentioned earlier, the individual certifications, but what the kind of current level of education is for the end user, because in the hour that we have, we've only barely touched the surface on a lot of these things. So, you know, you guys have in-person classes. I know you have some new online initiatives. Can you talk a little bit out some of those things? Yeah, absolutely. I'd say that education from Dolby's perspective is as accessible and variable as it's ever been, which is awesome. So to your point, you know, traditionally years ago before COVID it was all kind of in-person you know one-on-one kind of

white glove handholding type stuff but nowadays it's we still do instructor led trainings they're offered every month in every region of the world so we have one for the americas europe and Asia we also have a brand new self-guided training curriculum that we launched at the tail end of last year which has been overwhelmingly successful you can access that if you just go to learning.govy.com but you just make an account it's completely free we have an essentials training and advanced training, and it walks you through everything from what is Dole Vision to the fundamentals and theories behind HDR technologies and color gamuts and all that fun, nerdy science stuff we were talking about. But it's compacted and really easy to understand modules, and it's very adjustable

where you can just start a module, walk away, come back, you do it at your own pace. There's quizzes at the end, and then we typically recommend for folks that are completely new, start with there, so you can kind of go at your own pace. The instructor let is kind of the next step up if you want to kind of a more deep dive into a lot of the stuff you'd find in the self-guided trainings. And then, you know, we'd always encourage you to go ahead and do the certification as well, you know, actually doing Dolby Vision content creation is something that you're interested in. But we also are very active on our knowledge base. We have a great community form there.

We're publishing new articles there weekly and we're always constantly revising as technologies are changing and workflows and delivery specifications are shifting. We also have great video tutorials on YouTube. We just launched, again, last year we launched. our new resolve kind of masterclass-esque thing where it walks you through everything from setting up a Dolby Vision project, exporting IMFs and the whole Shabane. So we're really trying to make this as, you know, accessible as possible and really scale. We want everybody to be thinking of when you're thinking of, you know, content creation, not just on the professional side, but social

media and all these other things. We want you to be thinking of Dolby Vision and we want you to know and understand how to do it. Yeah. And big shout out to you and your colleagues on the knowledge based stuff too because like obviously you know I'm pretty knowledgeable about you know the workflows and the technology but sometimes you know there's little bits that just kind of go in one ear and out the other year and you're like how do I remember how to do that and having that reference to go back to like I I remember we had to edit some metadata I'm like I need to change the color primaries those metadata before the software even could do it knowledge based article exactly what to put in the XML done so having a resource that anybody can go to to look up what they

need when they need it is fantastic. Awesome. Yeah. And we love because that's a, that's a two-way street, right? Like it's guided by you guys. So we have this like internal joke where it's like, hey, we get the same question more than like two or three times. We're making an article for it. Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of been our mantra. And again, it's been really cool, you know, for me as someone who crafts

most of the, if not all the display related stuff to see people referencing that or I've seen, I've gone into facilities before where I've seen it printed out or I've seen it kind of saved in like a desktop folder. Like that's always really cool to us. So, you know, again, kudos to you guys. And we thank you for you know, supporting us in that endeavor. Awesome.

Well, hey, Nate, can't thank you enough for coming on and talking shop for a little bit. We'll have to have you on again soon because I'm looking at my list of questions I wanted to ask you. And after an hour and 15 minutes, I still have half the list. So we'll have to sometimes soon do part two on this. But I really wanted to say thanks for coming on. Nate McFarlane, everybody has been just a great wealth of knowledge here, Nate. So I can't thank you enough for that. Thank you, Joe.

Thank you, Robbie. It's been a pleasure to be here. Awesome. So as always, the Offset Podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, anywhere that you find podcasts. And if you are listening to this podcast and you like the conversation that we had with Nate today, please do us a favor and go ahead and like it and subscribe. Tell your friends, your colleagues, your kids, whoever you can get a hold of to tell them about the show. We love talking to professionals like Nate and learning a lot from him and hope you guys learned a lot from this.

As always, a big shout out to our editor Stella who makes us sound somewhat intelligible and like we know what we're talking about. And also just a big thanks again to our friends at Dolby who have, I think the last thing I'll say about Nate and his colleagues is that my experience over the past decade, they are perhaps the most approachable, conversational, relaxed, good to know people out there. You know, early on, I was worried about, well, I'm just this little colorist in this market. I'm not in L.A. or New York, didn't matter to them. They were equally as invested in our success with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos as just as they were with, you know, the biggest companies in the world. And so that's something I've never forgotten. And I think I encourage everybody who's getting into DV into Atmos to keep that in mind.

Because no matter what your question is or your experience or your workflow, that team is always there to help out. And they couldn't be any more gracious and helpful. So Nate, please give all your, all your colleagues a big high five. for us as well because it's always a great experience dealing with everybody we'll do like I said we love hearing from you guys so we appreciate anything and all feedback awesome all right well for the old offset podcast I'm Robbie Carmen and I'm Joey Deanna thanks for listening