Now that we have UHD TVs, streaming content, and optical discs and players, live broadcasting is one of the last puzzle pieces in the transition to a complete UHD ecosystem. Terrestrial UHD broadcasting—ATSC 3.0—is still under development and probably a couple of years away from full implementation, but satellite transmission is another story. According to a report at Digital Trends this week, DirecTV will launch its 4K channel by broadcasting the Masters Tournament golf classic from Augusta National Golf Club April 7-10, 2016.

Last December, DirecTV launched a satellite dedicated to 4K/UHD, which is parked in geosynchronous orbit at 99 degrees West longitude and uses an advanced beam-forming network to provide service to all 50 states and Puerto Rico. As far as I know, the service is not available elsewhere in the world—yet.

To watch DirecTV’s UHD broadcasts, which use the HEVC codec, you obviously need a UHDTV. If you happen to have a “DirecTV 4K-Ready” model (for a list, click here), you can use it without a separate client to decrypt the signal from an HR54 Genie HD DVR; otherwise, any UHDTV with HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 will work when connected to the latest 4K Genie Mini, which decrypts UHD content from the DVR. (Despite its name, the Genie HD DVR can record UHD programming.) You’ll also need to subscribe to DirecTV’s Ultimate or Premier packages.

Because the TV requirements specify HDMI 2.0—not 2.0a—we can surmise that the broadcast will not be in high dynamic range. Still, the additional resolution should make the game beautiful to behold; the article cites DirecTV saying that the detail may allow viewers to actually see the ball spin in the air and to pick out individual divots in the turf—to which I would add, as long as you’re mighty close to the screen!

Of course, this is only the first in what should be a steadily increasing flow of UHD content from DirecTV as well as other MVPDs (multichannel video programming distributors, i.e., cable and satellite providers). Live UHD broadcasting is finally here, and none too soon!

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Don Eklund, Senior VP of New Format Promotion at Sony Corporation, talks about UHD, high dynamic range, and wide color gamut, including the adoption rate of UHD TVs, the trend toward larger screen sizes and how that is actually more revealing of any flaws in the picture, how UHD/HDR content is becoming more available from various sources, UHD Blu-ray and the inconsistent quality of the initial releases, how studios select which titles to release on UHD Blu-ray in this initial rollout, HDR for live broadcasting, answers to chat-room questions, and more.

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Services that bring movie releases into the home day-and-date with their theatrical run are nothing new, but they have been tremendously expensive. For example, Prima Cinema has been available for several years; once your application is approved—your home theater and Internet access must meet certain stringent criteria—you can buy a 1080p server for $35,000 and download first-run movies for $500 each ($600 for 3D), with a 24-hour window to watch them. (An upcoming 4K server is expected to cost about $50,000.)

That could radically change if Sean Parker (pictured above) has his way. According to several articles at Variety, the cofounder of Napster and first president of Facebook is joining Prem Akkaraju, a live-event impresario, in a startup venture called Screening Room. The basic idea is the same as Prima Cinema, but for a whole lot less—a set-top box with robust anti-piracy technology would cost consumers about $150, and first-run movies would cost $50 each with a 48-hour window to watch them. I have found no details on the tech specs yet—1080p or 4K, HDR, 3D, etc.—but I will keep looking.

As you might expect, this could be seen as quite threatening to studios and especially commercial theaters, which have fought previous attempts to shorten the time between a movie’s theatrical release and its availability for home use. These interests are understandably afraid that such a service would cut deeply into their revenue from commercial exhibition. But Screening Room is planning to soften the blow by cutting them in on as much as $20 of the fee and offering customers who shell out the $50 two free tickets to a theater of their choice, which would lead to concession sales, where the bulk of commercial cinemas’ revenue comes from.

Several Hollywood heavyweights have come out in support of Screening Room, including Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Ron Howard, and J.J. Abrams. Jackson’s support surprised some after he opposed a deal that several studios struck with DirecTV in 2011 to make some releases available 60 days after they appeared in theaters rather than the customary 90 days.

As Jackson said in a recent statement, “I had concerns about DirecTV in 2011, because it was a concept that I believe would have led to the cannibalization of theatrical revenues, to the ultimate detriment of the movie business. Screening Room, however, is very carefully designed to capture an audience that does not currently go to the cinema. That is a critical point of difference with the DirecTV approach—and along with Screening Room’s robust anti-piracy strategy, is exactly why Screening Room has my support. Screening Room will expand the audience for a movie, not shift it from cinema to living room. It does not play off studio against theater owner. Instead it respects both, and is structured to support the long-term health of both exhibitors and distributors, resulting in greater sustainability for the wider film industry itself.”

In addition, the AMC theater chain, which will be come the largest exhibitor in the world if it completes its acquisition of Carmike Cinemas, appears to be very interested in becoming involved. Other studios expressing interest include Universal, Fox, and Sony, while Disney has apparently rejected the idea.

Also in the “no” camp is a group called Art House Convergence, which represents about 600 specialty or “art house” theaters. That group fears widespread piracy, perhaps by using a video camera to capture the content right off the screen, though it says it has no problem with the day-and-date aspect of the system.

What do you think? Is this good or bad for the movie business in general? Would you add the Screening Room service to your home theater?

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Bob Schulein and Dan Mapes-Riordan, audio-industry consultants and co-founders of ImmersAV Technology, discuss their new audio files that test the limits of a listener’s ability to perceive the dynamic range and high frequencies in high-res audio (HRA) content, including their motivation for developing the tests, how the tests were created and validated, judgement techniques, comments about each test, results from testing among AES members, what you need to conduct the tests for yourself, answers to chat-room questions, and more.

Note: The test files are now posted and ready for anyone to download them here.

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Many people believe that high-res audio (HRA) offers the potential for better sound quality than CDs by using higher sampling rates and greater bit depths—typically 96 kHz or more and 24 bits compared with CD’s 44.1 kHz and 16 bits. A higher sampling rate can represent a wider range of frequencies extending into the ultrasonic region, while a greater bit depth can represent a dynamic range beyond the 90 dB practical range of CDs.

The big question is, can humans actually perceive the higher frequencies and wider dynamic range offered by HRA? Bob Schulein, a long-time audio-industry consultant, and Dan Mapes-Riordan, an expert in psychoacoustics—both founding partners at ImmersAV Technology—have developed three sets of audio files that allow anyone to explore this question for themselves.

The Recordings

One set of files is used to determine the dynamic range you can perceive. They are based on a clip from “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” performed by Linda Ronstadt and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. It was imported from a CD into the editing program Audacity at 44.1 kHz/24 bits.

Since the purpose of these files is to test dynamic range, not frequency response, it was unnecessary to use a recording at a higher sampling rate. And although the original source file did not have 24-bit precision, adding eight more bits allows the level to be adjusted with greater precision than the original file. The final sample was also normalized to the maximum amplitude without clipping.

To test high-frequency perception, they recorded one swipe across a set of Latin Percussion chimes using a GRAS 46BL measurement microphone and 26CS preamp with an on-axis frequency response out to 40 kHz (+3 dB). The mic signal was recorded on a Tascam DR-100 at 96 kHz/24 bits and normalized in Audacity. The chimes have plenty of energy above 20 kHz, making the sound ideal for testing high-frequency acuity.

In this graph, you can see the spectrum of the chimes recording as measured from the output of the Tascam recorder and the amplifier.

The Tests

Each file in the dynamic-range test suite consists of a 20-second clip of the music played first at “reference” level, then at a reduced level, and finally again at reference level. This sequence is repeated in 19 separate files, and the level of the second clip is reduced in increments of 5 dB in each one, all the way down to -90 dB. As you listen to the files in order (put them in a playlist), note in which one the second clip becomes inaudible to you. Obviously, you’ll need to listen at the highest tolerable reference level in order to measure the maximum dynamic range you can perceive.

The dynamic-range test files attenuate the clip in 5 dB increments from one to the next.

You might wonder why the attenuation stops at “only” 90 dB, which CDs are capable of. Why not go down 100 dB or more? According to Bob, “This was my original goal, but when I exported files with as much as 100 dB attenuation, I found a practical lower level, beyond which the analog output of the three players I measured could not faithfully track the 5 dB steps of attenuation.

“I used pink noise to take the measurements of the players’ outputs. The players I measured were a Tascam DR-100, a Sony NWZ-A17, and a Pono Player. These devices have an analog output stage with a noise floor that eventually dominates the situation and doesn’t let you go below -90 dB. There might be some players with a better noise floor, but I have yet to find one. And there is little chance that one would be quiet enough to track the full dynamic range of a 24-bit actual signal. From our testing to date, no one has been able to hear anything below 85 dB attenuation.”

“The point is that dynamic-range specifications associated with 24-bit words are meaningful as long as you stay in the digital domain. But once you play the file back through a DAC [digital-to-analog converter], there is a practical noise floor that you can’t go below. When someone takes the test, they start to become calibrated as to what a 60 or 70 dB signal-to-noise ratio sounds like—it gets pretty darn quiet, to the point that there is very little of interest down that low, even when listening with insert earphones in a quiet space.”

To which Dan added, “It will be interesting if we get reports of people reaching 90 dB attenuation and still being able to hear the signal. This will require a very high-quality DAC analog stage and a quiet environment. We can easily amend the files to include more attenuation steps if necessary.”

The other two sets of files test the limits of your ability to hear high frequencies using the recording of the chimes. In one set, a highpass filter with a slope of 192 dB/octave is applied to the recording—the sample is played at full bandwidth, then with the filter applied, and finally at full bandwidth again. The filter cutoff starts at 1 kHz and increases in 1 kHz increments in each subsequent file, all the way up to 30 kHz. As you play the files in order, note at what point you can no longer hear the second sample.

A highpass filter is applied to the second sample, increasing its cutoff frequency in 1 kHz increments from one file to the next.

In the other set of bandwidth-test files, a lowpass filter with a slope of 192 dB/octave is applied to the chimes recording. In this case, a full-bandwidth sample is followed by a lowpass-filtered sample, ending with the full-bandwidth sample again. The lowpass cutoff frequency starts at 2 kHz and increases in each successive file in 1 kHz increments up to 30 kHz. As you listen to the sequence of files, note at what point the full-bandwidth and lowpass-filtered samples sound the same. As the cutoff frequency continues to increase from that point, the three samples should all sound the same and you get no further benefit from the additional higher frequencies.

A lowpass filter is applied to the second sample, increasing its cutoff frequency in 1 kHz increments from one file to the next.

Because of a psychoacoustical phenomenon called masking, the high-frequency limit you note from the lowpass-filter test will likely be lower than the result from the highpass-filter test. The lower frequencies in the recording mask the higher frequencies, whereas in the highpass-filter test, there are no lower frequencies. As you might surmise, the lowpass-filter test is more closely related to real-world content, which typically has a wide range of frequencies.

The Test System

Of course, you can use whatever audio-playback system you have, and doing so will address the question, “What happens when I use my existing gear to play HRA files?” But to test the limits of your hearing acuity, you need equipment that can reproduce everything in these files. So you need to start with a high-resolution audio player, such as the Sony NWZ-A17 or Pono player that can play uncompressed 96 kHz/24-bit files; Bob has measured both and found them to be sufficient.

The dynamic-range test can be played on any reasonably high-quality audio system. Using headphones—especially inserted earbuds with excellent sealing capabilities—will give the best result because they block ambient noise from reaching your ears.

The high-frequency tests are more system-dependent, since they rely on the ability to reproduce frequencies above 20 kHz. If you have headphones with a useful frequency response out to 30 kHz, you can connect them directly to the player. However, most headphones and earbuds do not exhibit smooth response that high, as seen in the following measurements by Bob:

Bob Schulein measured the frequency response of circumaural and in-ear headphones using a tiny microphone placed next to his eardrum.

To use a speaker, you need an amplifier with bandwidth out to at least 30 kHz. Bob recommends the Dayton Audio DTA-120 class-T amp with 60 watts/channel, which is available from Parts Express for under $90. He also notes that this amp’s signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is not sufficient to conduct the dynamic-range test, but it’s well-suited for the high-frequency tests.

To conduct the tests for yourself under optimum conditions, you need a high-res audio player, a wideband amplifier, a wideband speaker for the high-frequency tests, and insert earbuds for the dynamic-range test.

For the speaker, Bob built a custom rig using a Tymphany XT25SC90-04 tweeter, also from Parts Express, mounted in a 90° curved PVC joint. This tweeter has the necessary bandwidth and output level to conduct the high-frequency tests, and the whole thing costs very little.

Constructing a wideband tweeter is not difficult or expensive.

The two tweeters Bob built exhibit excellent frequency response out to 40 kHz.

In this graph, you can see the spectrum of the chimes recording as measured from the output of the Tascam recorder and the speaker; notice how similar the speaker graph is to the recorder’s output above 1 kHz.

Bob recommends placing the speaker about eight inches from and pointed directly at your ear. Using an SPL meter, set the output level to about 90 dB SPL as measured from where your ear will be.

The Test Results

Bob brought the test files, player, amp, and tweeter rig to the 139th AES (Audio Engineering Society) convention and a meeting of the Chicago section of AES, both in November 2015. In total, about 30 people took the tests, with the following results:

No one was able to discern a dynamic range greater than 85 dB or high frequencies above 20 kHz, and the averages were less than that.

The Files

Here are links to the test files developed by Bob and Dan. You can download each set of files separately or combined into one large file.

Dynamic Range Tests
Bandwidth Tests Using Highpass Filter
Bandwidth Tests Using Lowpass Filter
Combined HRA Test Files

In addition to representing higher frequencies and wider dynamic range than CD, the sound quality of HRA is affected by the lowpass filters used during recording and playback, which can introduce audible artifacts within the normal hearing band. This aspect of HRA is not addressed in these tests. Bob and Dan are working on ways to test for such artifacts, and I am eager to see what they come up with.

For more about this project, check out the video made by Bob Schulein:

Bob and Dan recently appeared on the Home Theater Geeks podcast to talk about the project. Also, the ImmersAV Technology website is full of interesting info.

I encourage you to post your results in the comments! But please do not quote this entire article when you post a comment. If you want to respond to something specific in the article, feel free to quote just that portion, but the whole thing is way too long to wade through in the comments section. Thanks!

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Today, Vizio announced the second-generation of its P-Series LED-LCD UHDTVs, which offer some of the features found previously only in the much-vaunted Reference Series. Unlike the first-gen P-Series, the new models include Dolby Vision high dynamic-range (HDR) capabilities—a happy coincidence, since Netflix launches its Dolby Vision service today—and they will be updated with HDR10 capabilities within 90 days.

To help facilitate HDR, Vizio doubled the number of local-dimming zones in the FALD sets from 64 to 128 in the 65″ and 75″ versions (126 in the 50″ and 55″ models), and the Active Pixel Tuning algorithm that controls individual pixels within each zone has been improved. Using the methodology defined by the UHD Alliance for Ultra HD Premium certification, Vizio calculates the contrast ratio to be 150,000:1, which far exceeds the certification’s requirement of 20,000:1 for LCD TVs.

At the briefing, I was told that the new sets can output as much as 600 nits from a full-screen white field. (Vizio does not plan to submit the P-Series for Ultra HD Premium certification, claiming that the test procedure is bogus.) Colorwise, the new P-Series achieves 96% of the DCI/P3 gamut without using quantum dots. Instead, the LED chemistry and color filters have been tuned to more precisely coincide and produce a wide color gamut that gets very close to P3 with minimal reduction in light output.

The HDR demos during the briefing—Dolby Vision streaming from Vudu—looked mighty fine. For example, the red long johns worn by the guitar player on the amplifier-car in Mad Max: Fury Road was a much richer, deeper red than BT.709 can manage, and the flames shooting out of his guitar were brighter and more detailed. Things were much the same on clips from Man of Steel and Pan, which also exhibited great shadow detail in low-light shots. And a feature called Black Bar Detection keeps the LEDs behind letterbox bars off, making them nice and black.

The P65 looked really good with custom content (seen here) as well as HDR movie clips streamed from Vudu.

Today’s announcement places equal—if not greater—emphasis on Vizio’s new SmartCast ecosystem, which integrates the operation of TVs (starting with the new P-Series), soundbars, and standalone speakers. All 2016 P-Series TVs come with a 6″ 1080p Android tablet remote running Lollipop on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and the tablet is pre-loaded with the SmartCast app. The app interfaces with the TV’s Google Cast capabilities to access content from over a thousand streaming-content sources. Even better, the SmartCast app aggregates content searches across multiple providers and categories, such as movies, TV shows, live TV, kids programming, etc., allowing you to easily find whatever you’re looking for wherever it’s available.

The P-Series comes with a 6″ Android tablet remote that sits in a wireless charging dock. The battery is said to last up to 14 days.

Perhaps the most important thing about SmartCast is that it separates navigation from consumption. To navigate in the traditional paradigm, you must be able to see the options on the screen from 10 feet away, point the remote at the TV, and navigate with arrow buttons, which can be quite cumbersome and inefficient. Moving the navigation to the tablet gives you much easier, more efficient control—for example, swiping rather than button-pushing through a list—and you don’t have to look at the TV screen to see a cursor move.

One thing I really like about this approach is that you can open the TV’s menu on the tablet and adjust the controls without disrupting the image on the screen, which is great for calibration. In addition, the SmartCast app can be installed on virtually any Android or iOS device, and multiple devices can control multiple TVs simultaneously. It’s a many-to-many, cross-platform system with great flexibility.

The new P-Series TVs are available starting today in four screen sizes—50, 55, 65, and 75 inches. The 55-incher uses an IPS panel for those who want a wider viewing angle, while the others use VA panels for deeper blacks. All panels and electronics are true 10-bit, which is good news for HDR fans.

P50-C1, MSRP $1000
P55-C1, MSRP $1300
P65-C1, MSRP $2000
P75-C1, MSRP $3800

At these prices, why even consider a Reference Series RS65, which lists for $6000? Using quantum-dot technology, the RS65 achieves an even wider color gamut (120% of P3 or 87% of BT.2020), and with 800 nits from a full-screen white field and 386 local-dimming zones, it provides even greater dynamic range (close to 800,000:1). But for those who don’t have $6000 to spend on a new TV, the P-series offers much of the RS65’s performance—and SmartCast—for a third of the price. I can’t wait to get my hands on one!

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Once in a while, my job has some nice perks. Take last night, for example—I was invited to a preview screening of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice at the Dolby Cinema Prototype Theater in Hollywood, CA, two days before its public opening. The venue is a private screening room with Dolby Vision high dynamic-range projection and Atmos immersive sound, which I wrote about here.

Since the movie opens tomorrow, I won’t offer any spoilers here, though given the title and all the press coverage so far, it’s no spoiler to say that Batman and Superman duke it out. When I first heard about the movie, I thought the premise was ridiculous—Batman and Superman are both good guys, so why would they be fighting? Also, Batman has no chance unless he manages to get some Kryptonite, in which case, he wins. Not much of a story there. But the plot that leads to the battle is actually pretty good.

At two and a half hours, it’s a long movie—longer than it needs to be, especially with some oddly slow pacing in several spots—but fans of comic books and comic-book movies will probably love it. Also, the almost-constant sensory bombardment started to wear me down after a while, and the entire movie is quite humorless except for a couple of incongruous lines. On the other hand, the cast is mostly excellent—I especially enjoyed Jeremy Irons as Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred, though I didn’t like Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor. And the cameos by many real-life newscasters and pundits as themselves, including astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about Superman the alien, were a lot of fun.

The presentation is absolutely amazing in Dolby Vision and Atmos. Visually, the dynamic range is exceptional. I loved the super-deep blacks (including the black interstitials and unmasked letterbox bars that completely disappeared), excellent shadow detail in low-light shots, beautiful juxtapositions of dark and bright elements in the same shots, and surprising detail in bright areas, especially in all the explosions and laser beams from the eyes of Superman and Doomsday. In fact, Batman v Superman has more and larger super-bright elements than any other Dolby Vision-graded movie I’ve seen to date—so bright, in fact, that it almost hurt. For example, early in the movie is a full-screen white interstitial that is nearly eye-searing, and I’m sure some of the explosions reached Dolby Vision’s peak luminance of 31 foot-lamberts.

Likewise, the Dolby Atmos soundtrack is among the most impressive I’ve heard to date. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of action in this movie, and it takes place all around the audience, fully occupying the immersive soundfield. The bombastic music by Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL is also mixed deeply into the surround and overhead speakers.

Even though one of the Dolby guys told me he had asked the projectionist to turn the volume down a notch from reference level just for me, it was still very loud: Leq (average RMS level over the length of the movie) = 95.8 dBZ (flat), 84.9 dBA, 94.0 dBC; Lmax (maximum 1-second RMS level) = 116 dBZ; L10 (level exceeded 10% of the time) = 98.5 dBZ; L50 (level exceeded 50% of the time) = 83.1 dBZ. I was very glad I had my earplugs!

The movie itself didn’t blow me away—I’m not surprised at the lukewarm reviews it’s getting—but the presentation certainly did. In fact, if the Ultra HD Blu-ray is mastered well, it will undoubtedly be a reference disc for HDR and Atmos immersive sound. If you live near a Dolby Cinema—of which there are currently 14 in the US and four in Europe (for a complete list, click here)—I highly recommend you see this epic there, even if it means driving some distance. Your effort will be rewarded with some of the best HDR imagery and immersive sound I’ve ever seen and heard.

Here’s a short video with Batman v Superman director Zack Snyder talking about the movie and the importance of Dolby Vision and Atmos. As he concludes, “If you really want a premium experience, that’s the way to see the movie.” I couldn’t agree more!

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Tyll Hertsens, editor-in-chief of InnerFidelity.com, answers questions from the chat room, including which headphones are best for bass heads, noise-canceling headphones, headphones for the hearing-impaired, headphones amps, new headphone technology, can headphones create a real sense of soundstage, the openness of Stax headphones, the legendary Sennheiser Orpheus headphones, in-ear monitors with out-of-phase drivers, the best earbuds (you won’t believe the answer!), and more.

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On this episode of The Tech Buzz Home Theater Monday, I talk about the new Vizio P-Series and answer questions from the hosts and chat room, including bias lighting, various audio topics, and how I would spend $6000 to equip a home theater from scratch.

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Yesterday, Sony Pictures announced that its latest streaming service, called Ultra, will launch on April 4. First announced at CES last January, the service will start by offering a variety of movies from Sony Pictures in 4K/UHD resolution, many with high dynamic range using HDR10, “digital extras” (presumably similar to Blu-ray bonus features), and UltraViolet functionality to allow various devices to share the same content.

The service, which is powered by the online Sony Pictures Store, will be available only on new Sony 4K/UHD TVs in the US. Customers who buy eligible TVs with Ultra this summer will receive four complimentary movies when they sign up for the service, which will help take a bit of the sting out of the $30 purchase price for each movie. (Ultra will not offer rentals at launch.) Those who have already purchased HD versions of available titles from the Sony Pictures Store will be able to upgrade them to 4K/UHD/HDR on Ultra for a special discounted price, though we don’t know how significant that discount will be.

As you might imagine, only Sony Pictures titles will be available for now, including new releases such as Concussion, The Night Before, and The Walk as well as catalog titles like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Ghostbusters.

Jake Winett, VP of Consumer Services & Advanced Platforms at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, says, “Consumers are rapidly upgrading their living rooms to 4K, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s new Ultra streaming service will provide a premium viewing experience to satisfy growing demand for 4K movies and television shows. Ultra takes advantage of the latest industry innovations—4K resolution, high dynamic range, a wider color spectrum, digital movie extras, and UltraViolet interoperability—so viewers get the most out of their televisions and their movie collections.”

To which I would add, so viewers get the most out of their Sony televisions and Sony Pictures movie collections. Still, anything that gets more HDR content into the market is good news in my book.

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Tyler Pruitt (WiFi-Spy), technical liaison for SpectraCal, and Tom Forsythe (thomasfxlt), one of the first consumers to purchase a Vizio P-Series monitor, talk about the new game-changing display, including Dolby Vision and HDR10, wide color gamut, Google Cast, control via mobile device and Tom’s wishlist for upgrading the included tablet, the lack of an OTA tuner, the feud between Amazon and Google that prevents the P-Series from streaming Amazon content, the challenges of calibrating for HDR, Tom’s calibration results, answers to chat-room questions, and more.

Below are some of Tom’s pre- and post-calibration results from CalMan.

Here are Tom’s BT.709 pre-calibration results for the P75 in the Calibrated Dark picture mode.

Here are the BT.709 post-calibration results.

Here are Tom’s Dolby Vision pre-calibration results in the Calibrated Dark picture mode, using CalMan’s Dolby Vision workflow.

Here are the Dolby Vision post-calibration results. In the current version, CalMan provides 2-point grayscale calibration for this set, and the grayscale dips in the midrange between the calibration points. But red, green, and blue stay tightly aligned, so the color of gray doesn’t change.

Tom shot this photo of a paused frame from Heart of the Sea, which was streamed from Vudu in Dolby Vision, before calibration.

In this photo of the same frame after calibration (using the same photographic settings as the previous shot), you can see the color is more natural with no blue cast, and there is more detail in the embracing couple and muddy pathway.

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This week, Technicolor made an incredible announcement—it has encoded the digital representation of a movie in artificial, “non-biological” DNA. According to an article at phys.org, the first movie to receive this treatment is A Trip to the Moon, the 1902 French silent film. In fact, the vial in the photo above is said to contain a million copies of the movie in a few drops of water.

The announcement was part of Technicolor’s centenary celebration, which also included a new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The company started in Boston in 1915 and moved to Los Angeles in 1920, where it has provided post-production and other services for the movie industry ever since.

As you may know, the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecule normally encodes all the data needed to define all the characteristics of any lifeform found on Earth. The molecule forms a double helix—sort of a spiral ladder in which the “rungs” consist of the chemical bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine arranged in pairs. Amazingly, about 90,000 DNA molecules span the width of a single human hair.

Technicolor’s achievement is based on research conducted at Harvard University, in which roughly 700 terabytes of data was stored in one gram of DNA material in 2012. Now, a team led by Jean Bolot, VP for Research and Innovation at Technicolor, has digitized A Trip to the Moon and converted the data into DNA code in the form of molecules. The information is “read” by sequencing the DNA, a common practice today, and converting the results back into digital data.

This technology is still highly experimental. A Trip to the Moon took six weeks and tens of thousands of dollars to encode as DNA, but Bolot’s team is working on making the process commercially viable. “We don’t know yet if that’s going to work, but if it does—and we’ll know, we expect, within a year—then this will really unlock a new age for archiving,” he said.

Of course, long-term archiving is a big problem in the digital age. All magnetic and optical media degrade over time, even when stored under ideal conditions, and formats become obsolete. As Bolot says, “If I gave you a movie in the form of floppy discs from the beginning of the IBM PC, you would not even know how to read the movie because there are no more floppy-disc readers.” But DNA is far more robust. “The guys at Harvard told me if you left this [vial] on a hot Arizona pavement with trucks running over it, and you come back in 10,000 years, it will still be readable,” he reports.

That’s huge news for movie studios, whose archives now occupy square kilometers of floor space in carefully controlled environments. Bolot says that, with DNA encoding, the archives of every Hollywood studio could fit in the space of one Lego brick. Imagine how little space a personal movie library—even the most extensive library in the world—would require!

Scientists have been working on using DNA as a storage medium for many years—I remember writing about it well over a decade ago as something we might see in the far future. Well, that future is here much sooner than I would have ever expected, and I’m extremely excited by the possibilities. Well done, Technicolor, and happy 100th birthday!

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Juan Reyes, Chief Innovation Officer at My Eye Media, talks about his company’s work testing content for flaws before it’s released to the public, including the facilities and equipment used, objective/quantitative measurements versus subjective/qualitative evaluations, the challenges of assessing high dynamic-range (HDR content), how quality-control engineers are trained, the importance of testing on many different displays, testing Dolby Atmos and DTS:X immersive-audio content, answers to chat-room questions, and more.

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As you probably know, streaming is becoming an increasingly important source of video content in homes around the world. And few would dispute that Roku is among the top providers of streaming content, with more apps—many offering 4K/UHD—than just about any other platform. So it makes perfect sense to incorporate Roku into a TV, which is exactly what TCL has done with several lines of its 4K/UHD LCD flat panels.

What could be better? Getting one of these beauties for free, of course! AVS Forum and TCL are giving away three 55UP130 55″ 4K/UHD Roku TVs (retail value $599 each) over the next three months. To enter, all you have to do is provide some basic contact info here—no payment or purchase of any kind is necessary to enter or win. You don’t even have to be a member of AVS, though joining is also free and easy, and doing so lets you participate in over a million conversations about all things audio and video.

The contest period extends from April 12 – June 30, 2016, and one entry will be selected at random around the end of April, May, and June. If your entry is selected in one of the first two rounds, you can’t win again later, but if your entry is not selected before the end of the sweepstakes, no worries—you’re still entered to win in a later round.

So what are you waiting for? Go to the sweepstakes entry form, fill it out, and cross your fingers. Who knows? You could find a 55UP130 4K/UHD Roku TV from TCL delivered to your door!

For complete terms and conditions of the sweepstakes, click here.

To learn more about TCL TVs, click here.

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In the world of high definition, the brightness of each primary color (red, green, and blue) in each pixel is represented with 8 bits, providing a maximum of 256 discrete brightness levels from 0 to 255. (In practice, consumer-video signals typically use the range from 16 to 235, though the high end sometimes extends above 235.) Combined with specs for peak brightness and color gamut, this is known as standard dynamic range (SDR), and it has worked relatively well for HD and its color gamut of BT.709. All HD displays can accept and render video signals with 8-bit precision.

But Ultra HD includes the possibility of high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG), and 8 bits per color are no longer sufficient. HDR means there is a greater range from darkest to brightest, and WCG means there is a greater range of colors that can be more saturated than BT.709. If this information is represented and displayed with 8-bit precision, the “distance” between consecutive brightness levels is larger than it is with SDR. The result is clearly visible as banding in areas of the image with gradual gradations in brightness, such as sunsets, blue sky, and underwater shots. Consequently, HDR content is represented with at least 10 bits per color.

The 8-bit version of this image has clear banding, while the 10-bit version does not.

Because of this, you’d think that all HDR-capable displays must have at least 10-bit precision from the input through the electronics to the raw display panel itself, but that is not necessarily true. Of course, the input must be able to accept a signal with at least 10-bit precision, though there are several places along the signal path—such as some HEVC decoders—where the bit depth might be reduced to 8 bits.

Then there’s the actual display panel (e.g., LCD, OLED, or projector imager). It turns out that some panels in HDR-capable TVs have 8-bit native precision, because 10-bit panels are more expensive to manufacture and therefore increase the price of the final product.

In a Dither

How can an 8-bit panel—or any other 8-bit step in the signal path—reproduce a 10-bit HDR image without banding? There are two main techniques to do this. One is spatial dithering, in which neighboring pixels are assigned color values in such a way that the banding is obscured. But this sometimes results in visible artifacts such as a checkerboard effect or what looks like noise, so it isn’t used much in consumer TVs.

The other, more common technique is temporal dithering, often called frame-rate control (FRC). In this process, a pixel rapidly alternates between two colors to give the impression of a third color. Depending on the specific algorithm used, this can work much better than spatial dithering, but it can also result in visible artifacts such as twinkling, especially in dark areas. Still, this process works so well, it’s even used in some professional monitors that are widely used in color grading.

In my recent article listing HDR-capable displays, one of the most heated discussions in the comments is about the native bit depth of the panel used in this or that model of TV. Unfortunately, some manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sony, do not officially reveal the bit depth of the panels in their HDR displays, saying that an 8-bit panel with good processing can perform better than a 10-bit panel with poor processing.

That may well be true, but I maintain that an 8-bit panel is an inherent bottleneck in the HDR signal chain, and compensating for it with dithering—even high-quality dithering—is not as desirable as using a 10-bit panel with good processing. Such a TV is generally more expensive to manufacture and purchase, but in my view, it’s worth it to get the best possible HDR image.

Manufacturer Specs

Is it possible to determine the native bit depth of a display’s panel? If the manufacturer clearly specifies it, great. But in some cases, a manufacturer’s marketing department might not know, or it might be misinformed. And as mentioned earlier, some manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sony, do not officially reveal this information.

One of models most often cited in that heated discussion about HDR-capable displays is the Samsung HU9000, the 2014 flagship UHDTV with no HDR capabilities when it was introduced. Those capabilities were added when owners upgraded the outboard One Connect Evolution Kit to the 2015 SEK-3500. But what is the native bit depth of the HU9000’s panel itself?

To answer this question, some AVS members pointed to a video interview from SPSN (Samsung Product Support Network)—a Samsung-sponsored YouTube channel—in which National Product Testing Manager Scott Cohen clearly states that the HU9000 has a 10-bit panel. Also, some members have cited the spec sheet for a replacement panel for the HU9000 from third-party supplier TV Service Parts, which clearly indicates that it’s a 10-bit panel.

However, it turns out that the panel within the HU9000 is, in fact, 8-bit, and that Scott Cohen and TV Service Parts were mistakenly misinformed. (There was no intent to deceive; it was a clerical error.) You can verify this by going to Samsung’s own replacement-part site and searching for part number BN95-01688A, which is the replacement panel for the UN78HU9000. As you can see on that page, the panel is specified as 8-bit. This info has also been corrected on the TV Service Parts site.

EDID

So is there a way to determine the native bit depth of a TV’s panel on your own? Some AVS members use a program like Monitor Asset Manager, which queries the TV about its capabilities via EDID (Extended Display ID). This causes the TV to send information about its capabilities back along the HDMI cable to the computer running the software.

The screen shot above is the result of an AVS member using Monitor Asset Manager with an HU9000 and the 2015 SEK-3500 One Connect Evolution Kit. The EDID reports that the TV supports 30 and 36 bpp (bits per pixel), which translates to 10 and 12 bits per color, respectively. However, this does not reveal anything about the LCD panel’s native bit depth, only that the SEK-3500 can accept 10- and 12-bit signals. As we now know, the panel’s native bit depth is actually 8 bits, and the SEK-3500 dithers 10- and 12-bit signals to 8 bits.

One member posted the screen shot above from the software control panel of his GeForce 750 graphics card, which was connected to an HU9000 with SEK-3500. The software allowed him to select the card’s maximum bit depth for that display, 32 bits per pixel, which was claimed to indicate that the TV can accept a 10-bit signal (30 bpp). However, this probably means that the card can send no more than 24 bpp plus an 8-bit “alpha” channel. Also, if the HDMI bandwidth of this card is 10.2 Gbps (which I haven’t yet verified), it can’t send any more than 8 bits per color at 4K/60p, as the control panel indicates.

Photos

Some members post photographic screen shots of their TVs showing HDR content to demonstrate that they are HDR-capable—and in some cases, to ask other members if the TV is HDR-capable based on the photos. Unfortunately, this is a completely useless exercise because there are so many unknowns. What’s the dynamic range captured by the camera? What’s the dynamic range of the monitor or display used to view the photos on AVS? (It’s probably not HDR.) There is no well-defined way to do this, so it’s not valid proof of anything—except perhaps to illustrate that one TV looks different than another if the photos were taken with the same camera using the same settings under the same conditions.

Test Patterns

Tyler Pruitt (WiFi-Spy), technical liaison at SpectraCal, started a thread in the Display Calibration forum that offers a short test clip with two 2160p 10-bit gradient ramps—that is, 3840×2160 images with smooth gradients from black to white and black to 75% gray created and encoded with 10-bit precision. (The pattern also includes a simulated 8-bit gradient for comparison.) The purpose of the test is to determine if a TV’s panel is 10-bit or 8-bit; if it’s 8-bit, you should see banding in the image.

Here is one frame from Tyler’s 10-bit gradient pattern.

In the same thread, Tyler also included a similar test pattern created by Stacey Spears (sspears), chief color scientist at SpectraCal and co-creator of the Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark set-up Blu-ray. It includes two gradient ramps—one encoded with 10-bit precision and the other with the 10-bit values rounded to 8 bits. Both gradients slowly rotate, which makes it much easier to see any banding.

In this pattern from Stacey Spears, the two gradients rotate to more easily see any banding. The one of the right is encoded with 10-bit precision, and the one on the left uses 10-bit values that have been rounded to 8 bits.

These test patterns are all well and good—in fact, they’re excellent—but they do not directly address the question of the raw panel’s native bit depth. They only assess the performance of the display system as a whole, including the processing and panel. For example, if the panel has a native bit depth of 8 bits, it might perform these tests well if the dithering algorithm is good.

To illustrate this point, a new test pattern from Stacey includes three rotating gradients—one with 10-bit precision, one with rounded 8-bit values, and one with 8-bit spatially dithered values. The 8-bit rounded pattern should exhibit obvious banding in most cases, while the 10-bit and 8-bit dithered patterns should look close to the same, though the 10-bit should look a bit cleaner because compression filters out some of the dither via quantization.

In this pattern, Stacey illustrates the difference between rounding and dithering 10-bit values to 8 bits. In some cases, such as the Panasonic DX800 LCD TV for the European market, he says the 8-bit dithered pattern actually looks better than the straight 10-bit pattern.

Bottom Line

As Stacey Spears has pointed out to me, there is no way to definitively measure the native bit depth of a display panel without physically dismantling the TV and testing the panel directly, which is clearly impractical. So I’m afraid those who believe that the tests mentioned in this article can provide this information are mistaken. Instead, these tests measure the performance of the system as a whole.

An HDR display with an 8-bit panel and good dithering algorithms can certainly display HDR content in a way that looks better than the best SDR presentation. But I would prefer a panel with a native bit depth of at least 10 bits, along with a signal path that maintains 10-bit precision from one end to the other. I wish there was a foolproof way for consumers to determine this for all displays, but in some cases, there isn’t.

Still, the bottom line is how it looks displaying real program material. If you like what you see, there’s no need to stress about the panel’s bit depth—just sit back and enjoy!

Many thanks to Stacey Spears and Tyler Pruitt of SpectraCal for their generous help with this article.

Note: Please do not quote this entire article when posting a comment. Feel free to quote the relevant portion that pertains to your comment, but wading through the entire thing in the comments is quite annoying. Thanks!

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Chief Twit Leo Laporte and Giz Wiz Dick DeBartolo join me to celebrate the 300th episode of Home Theater Geeks! We talk about how I met Leo and Dick, what audio/video gear each of them currently uses, and how the AV landscape has changed over the 6+ years that HTG has been on the TWiT network, including the rise of “virtual media” (i.e., streaming and downloading), the death of CRT and plasma TVs, surround sound and immersive audio, the appearance of high dynamic range, high-resolution audio, high frame rates, and much more. The title of this episode was inspired by a graphic created by my wife to commemorate this momentous occasion, which you can see near the beginning of the show.

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At the Future of Cinema Conference that precedes the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention this week, the big buzz is an 11-minute rough-cut clip from Ang Lee’s upcoming movie Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Due to be released this fall, the movie is based on a novel by Ben Fountain and tells the tale of an Army unit that returns from Iraq to be honored during the halftime show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. But that’s only the most superficial description; it goes much deeper than that—in fact, it’s been called the Catch-22 of the Iraq war.

Aside from the incredibly moving, emotional story, what makes this movie remarkable—unique, in fact—is that Lee shot it at 120 frames per second, five times the frame rate of almost all movies for the last hundred years. Other capture parameters include 4K and native 3D—which means 120 fps for each eye!

Conference attendees waited in long lines to see the demo, which was repeated six times during the afternoon. We had to surrender our cell phones and cameras before entering the room to make sure no one captured any unauthorized images.

The 11-minute clip comprised nearly 10 terabytes of uncompressed data split between two 7thSense servers, each of which was connected to a Christie Mirage 4KLH RGB laser-illuminated projector, the only projector in the world capable of rendering 4K at 120 fps. Each server transmitted its data to the corresponding projector using four DisplayPort connections, each one sending a 2K section at 120 fps, and the four sections were tiled to form the complete 4K image.

The demo used Dolby 3D, a process in which one projector renders the image for the left eye and the other projector renders the image for the right eye. Each projector uses slightly different wavelengths of red, green, and blue—a technique commonly called 6P to indicate a total of six primary colors (two reds, two greens, two blues)—and the glasses filter the wavelengths so only one set of primaries reaches each eye.

The image was projected onto a 25-foot-wide, 1.85:1, matte-white screen. With a native contrast ratio of about 3000:1, the Mirage projectors do not exhibit high dynamic range, but they were able to achieve a peak luminance of 28 foot-lamberts at each eye through the Dolby 3D glasses. That’s twice as bright as Dolby Vision 3D and around eight times brighter than conventional 3D in a commercial cinema.

Superlatives seem entirely inadequate in light of what I saw—it was astounding. At 120 fps, all movement—including moving objects and camera pans—was crystal clear with absolutely no visible strobing or motion blur. Of course, some will complain that it isn’t “film-like,” and a few people reported that it looked like video, but those same people were so impressed that it didn’t matter to them, and they soon forgot about it. Instead, they were blown away by images never before seen in a commercial-cinema presentation—and so was I.

The image was very bright, especially the scenes in the desert of Iraq, which looked a bit blown out—an intentional effect, I’m sure. The black level was not terribly deep, but then again, there weren’t many really dark shots in the clip we saw. Later, we were told that the footage was shot and protected for high dynamic range, so I expect the final version to have a much greater dynamic range, at least if it’s shown in Dolby Cinemas.

Perhaps even more amazing to me was that I saw virtually no problems with the Dolby 3D glasses. Normally, I really dislike this technology because of reflections between the inner surface of the 3D glasses and the outer surface of my prescription glasses, which result in milky halos around the screen and double images. But I saw none of that in this case, and I’m not sure why. My best guess is because the image was so bright, though I was also told that the design of the glasses has been improved with better tuning of the filters to the wavelengths used for each eye.

Whatever the reason, it was easily the best, most comfortable 3D I’ve ever seen, with no “cardboard cutout” effect. It looked like I was actually watching the scene in the real world. More than one viewer commented that when someone crossed the screen in the near field, they thought it was someone in the audience, and I can certainly understand that misperception.

Late in the afternoon, Ang Lee and several of the people working on the movie took the stage in the conference room to talk about it. Lee acknowledged Douglas Trumbull—who was my guest on the Home Theater Geeks podcast last December—as one of the people who opened his eyes to what high frame rates can do. He emphasized that he wanted to “see more clear” and that HFR and well-made 3D could achieve that goal.

L-R: Tim Squyres, editor; Ang Lee, director; Ben Gervais, production systems supervisor; Demetri Portelli, stereographer; Scot Barbour, VP, Production Technology, Sony Pictures Entertainment; David Cohen (Variety), moderator

However, this also meant they would have to relearn the art of moviemaking. “We are brainwashed about how to make movies,” he said. Everything about this movie would be different, from lighting to makeup—in fact, they used almost no makeup at all, leading the actors to engage in a weeks-long regimen to clear their skin. As Lee put it, “I want to see through the skin, through the eyes, into how the characters feel.” He also said that the more clarity the image has in terms of resolution and lack of strobing, the more deeply it impacts the emotions of the audience.

As a counter-example, Lee mentioned one of his previous movies, Life of Pi. Shot at 24 fps, he said you sometimes can’t see Suraj Sharma’s performance as the boat he was in moved around on the ocean due to motion blur and strobing. At 120 fps, you can really see the actors’ performance in every detail. As a result, even acting becomes more difficult, requiring the actors to get closer to real life.

Editor Tim Squyres mentioned that shooting at 120 fps with a 360-degree shutter angle (the shutter remains open during the entire frame) is more like capturing data, which allows much more flexibility in how the movie is ultimately presented. This is critically important, since there are no commercial cinemas that can currently show content at 4K/3D/120 fps. The Christie Mirage projectors used in the demo are not actually digital-cinema projectors, because they do not have the security protections required for commercial distribution.

The best that commercial cinemas can do is 2K/3D/60 fps with one projector (e.g., a Christie Series 2, which is found in many commercial theaters) or 2K/3D/120 fps with two projectors. Reducing the frame rate to 60 or even 24 fps is not a simple matter of dropping frames; instead, adjacent frames are blended together. As a result, every version all the way down to streaming to mobile devices will look much better than if the movie had been shot at the lower rate to begin with. (Interestingly, Lee’s team has a pair of Mirage projectors, but the Avid software can barely support 4K/3D/60 fps, so that’s the format they must use for editing.)

Lee had wanted his next project to be a boxing movie, but when he read Ben Fountain’s novel, he realized that it would be a superb vehicle for HFR 3D. “People don’t understand veterans,” he said, “and this is a good way to examine the new technology and humanity.” He sees movie theaters as temples—”I pray to the movie god,” he quipped. His dream is to create a spiritual experience in a shared space, and I’m convinced that Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk will deliver that experience beautifully.

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We are looking for an owner of a Dolby Atmos home-theater system near one of these areas who would be willing to show off their system on camera and participate in a short interview for a video we’re producing. In particular, the video is about Atmos-enabled speakers—upfiring speakers that reproduce the overhead channels by reflecting sound from the ceiling—so we need to find someone with such a system in their home theater.

If you’d like to be considered or nominate someone you know, please send me a private message, post a comment, or use the Contact Us link at the bottom of any page on AVS Forum.

I look forward to hearing from you!

The post Calling All Dolby Atmos HT Owners near San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Toronto appeared first on AVSForum.com.

Other than the high frame-rate clip from Ang Lee’s upcoming movie Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, one of the most impressive demos I saw at NAB 2016 was presented by Christie Digital. In collaboration with Dolby, the company co-developed the high dynamic-range (HDR) projectors found in Dolby Cinemas, but in this case, the HDR was pure Christie, not Dolby Vision.

The projector was a 4K, 3-chip DLP engineering prototype utilizing RGB lasers as the illumination source. Firing onto a 16-foot-wide, matte-white Da-Lite screen (0.9 gain), it produced a peak luminance of 200 nits (56 foot-lamberts)—four times the brightness of a conventional digital cinema and nearly twice as bright as a Dolby Cinema—and a color gamut that reached all the way to BT.2020. And like a Dolby Cinema projector, this one had a claimed contrast ratio of over 1,000,000:1.

The demo included several parts played at 24 fps, starting with a demonstration of standard and high dynamic range with full-screen black fields. When the projector switched to HDR, the audience literally gasped as how the screen completely disappeared. Fortunately, the small demo space—dubbed the Innovation Theater—was completely blacked out with no exit signs or other lighting.

Then, we saw some CG renderings of an automobile engine and slow-moving footage of parked cars that switched between SDR and HDR while the recorded voiceover pointed out how much more shadow detail was visible as how much brighter the specular highlights were. Interestingly, this footage was not mastered in HDR; instead, Christie processing expanded the dynamic range in real time, and it looked excellent.

Next up was a clip from Dark Universe, an educational short narrated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Again, this selection was not mastered in HDR, but it looked spectacular anyway. (BTW, if you get a chance to see it at the American Museum of Natural History or the Hayden Planetarium in New York City or the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, by all means do. It’s an excellent exposition of modern cosmology.)

Finally, we saw the trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road, which had been mastered for HDR and BT.2020 color especially for this demo. As expected, it looked fantastic, with deep blacks, amazing shadow detail, vivid colors, and startling brightness where needed.

When I expressed my concern about expanding the dynamic range of SDR content to Mike Perkins, principal product developer at Christie, he said that increasing the brightness of good SDR images is often not a problem. However, he also said that pushing it above about 400 nits can look pretty bad, especially with people in the image, since humans are so sensitive to how other humans look. But the SDR footage in the demo had no people in it, and it was pushed to “only” 200 nits, so he was confident that it would look fine—and it sure did!

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I hit the show floor at NAB 2016 to talk with the technologists behind the latest developments in content and distribution, including the first live demonstration of the ATSC 3.0 terrestrial broadcast system, Fraunhofer’s lightfield and omnidirectional camera technologies, Dolby Vision and AC-4 audio in the home, SMPTE HDR standards, Christie HDR, HDR calibration from SpectraCal, Sony’s new 55″ OLED monitor, the switch to IP in the field with JVC, JBL’s Series 7 speakers, AKG’s latest flagship pro headphones, and more.

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