“Hey Guys, let’s re-invent the entire TV and Cinema chains from Camera to Screen!” said no high-ranking executive in any board meeting ever. The whole concept sounds like crazy talk when you say it out loud, but in reality that’s what the High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wide Color Gamut (WCG) revolution have done over the recent years.

We’ve moved on from glowing goop 

The cinema world, shooting on film, has always had a little more freedom that the TV world when it comes to controlling brightness, color and contrast between the camera and the screen. There were limitations in physics and chemistry, of course. You could make the projector brighter assuming you didn’t melt the film and you could make the film more sensitive provided you liked that grainy look on the screen. The TV world, however had a fixed and inflexible transmission infrastructure that was stabilized in the 1950s. The relationship between the photons going into a camera and the photons coming out of most of today’s TV are still based on the response characteristics of the glowing goop you find inside CRTs (Cathode Ray Tubes) of that early era.

So in comes HDR. “Hey guys the eye can capture about 14 stops of brightness so let’s transmit that.” is the fundamental idea behind HDR. In a basic MPEG system, the brightness of most pixels is represented by a number between 0 and 255. This gives you the ability to represent 8 stops (28 values) whereas we would like to represent 214 values in our HDR chain i.e. the brightness of each pixel is represented by a number between 0 and 16383. Sounds simple really. But, what is Dolby Vision HDR?

Let’s redesign the entire Cinema and Broadcast Value chain 

The complexity comes with making sure that each and every device in the value chain from camera through switcher and ingest and transcode understands what these new numerical values actually mean. In an ideal world we would replace all the old kit with brand new kit, but that’s not really practical so the HDR systems that were created have compatibility modes to allow these new bright, colorful pixels to travel across traditional SDI, H.264 and IP transmission paths with good integrity to appear at the final display to show wondrous pictures.

Now, what is Dolby Vision HDR? Dolby Vision is one of the HDR systems that requires metadata to work. Its trick is identifying that in any typical scene you only use a portion of the total available dynamic range. A dark shadowy scene in a cave will need more bits allocated in the small numerical pixel value ranges. A bright seaside scene on a sunny day will need more bits allocated in the large numerical pixel value range. This scene by scene adaption is enabled with metadata that tells each device how to behave for that scene. The Dalet AmberFin team is really proud that it’s the first software only transcoder and workflow engine to have full support for the Dolby Vision system. It can do this in a wide range of different codecs in parallel with the usual array of high quality video processing functions from scaling to Standards Conversion.

The Dolby Vision metadata itself might be carried in a sidecar XML file or embedded within the media file as a data track. Whichever mechanism is used, it’s vitally important to retain the synchronization between the metadata and the images to get the best results particularly when aligning metadata changes to hard cuts in the video. This becomes doubly important when frame rate converting because blended frames and mis-timing of metadata combined are highly visible, highly annoying and consume a lot of bitrate in the final encoding. A transcoder like the Dalet AmberFin platform gets all of those complex factors right first time, resulting in high efficiency, low bitrate, outstanding picture.

In today’s era, the consumer often lead the professionals 

So, what is Dolby Vision HDR and why is it important? HDR is important because the consumers of media get to see HDR on the content they make on their mobile devices. If the paid-for entertainment content they see on other platforms looks washed out and old-fashioned by comparison, then this will be a factor in what media gets consumed. If anyone has a spare crystal ball to help predict what this future might look like, then I would be very grateful to borrow it for a while!

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Of course, the big highlight from CES this year was wearable technology for pets (or if you’re my mother-in-law, the new automated sewing machine from Brother). But amongst the wearable, virtual reality and Internet of Things technology making the CES headlines, there are one or two trends that will undoubtedly follow on to conversations back in Las Vegas, in April, at NAB.

Although there were incremental advancements in 4K technology and content availability/distribution, HDR dominated the CES announcements in video. High Dynamic Range (explained rather wonderfully here by David Wood), is not new, but with providers like Netflix committed to bringing HDR to consumers, and even stating that HDR will make a greater difference to viewers than more pixels, it’s pretty clear that this trend is going to gain traction with consumers.

Now for that bit from Netflix. Chief product officer, Neil Hunt, told The Telegraph, “With 4K, there are enough pixels on the screen that your eyeball can’t really perceive any more detail, so now the quest for more realism turns into, can we put better pixels on the screen? […] I think that’s actually a more important quality improvement to get to the brightness and detail in the picture than the 4K is by itself.”

It’s no coincidence that while Netflix is making these statements, other players are launching rival services and following suit, not only responding to the trend of “cord-cutting” but looking at ways to deliver UHD (Ultra High Definition) content and expand markets. In fact, some of the industry’s biggest players are teaming up to make UHD content (which will soon incorporate HDR) transparent to consumers while establishing open and flexible standards that will make the oft-talked about ideals and features of UHD a consistent and sustainable reality.

Dubbed the UHD Alliance, founding members include Technicolor, DirecTV, Dolby, Netflix, Panasonic Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Sony Visual Product Inc., The Walt Disney Company, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. Entertainment. (Learn more about the UHD Alliance in the official press release from Technicolor).

Which brings us to standards. For content produces, owners and distributors, new distribution methods, formats and expanding markets can only mean one thing: more versions.

Looking ahead to NAB, this is the common theme that will run through announcements and demonstrations at the show, resulting in:

• Enhancements to encoders to create versions faster, with higher quality and lower bit rates – relating to new codecs, new technologies for encoding or simply new operating points

• Wider adoption and implementation of international and local standards for multi-version creation and file-based media delivery such as IMF or UK-DPP formats

• Tools and workflows for smart management of multi-version media assets

Like CES, it’s possible that for the media industry at NAB 2015 we may not see any groundbreaking innovation – but I’m sure we’re going to see vendors like ourselves using technology to improve the business of creating, managing and distributing content.

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