Dolby Cinema

Yeah, the "gay people love 3D" comment was a joke...

 

When was the last film actually shot in 3D, instead of being post-converted?

 

I've only paid for 3D once, ArcLight Sherman Oaks. It was for the Thor: The Dark World. The 3D effects were NOT impressive and neither was the Atmos mix. Adding insult was the dim image and cavern effect caused by the active glasses. I checked the Batcave and the ArcLight is the only theater in America using it.

 

The upcoming "Transformers" movie was shot 3D...

 

Last year was BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK and X-MEN: APOCALYPSE. Billy Lynn being also shot in 120fps.

 

That's another one I was not given the opportunity to see in high frame rate, it only being offered in 3D.

 

A high frame rate screening Of Billy Lynn was at the Cinemark Movie 10, an hour away in Delaware, but after the poor reviews it didn't read like it was worth the trip.

 

It was a weird mixture of presentations for that film, based on which theaters had what. Only two theaters had the whole ball of wax, with hfr, laser projection and 3-D. Not sure if anyone presented hfr without 3-D, but you can check it out that way on the 4K disc, if you're so capable.

 

Yeah, I wanted to see it "as intended ", but nothing was close and reviews were middling.

 

My local Cinemark has the XD experience that I enjoy.

Probably very similar to Dolby Cinema.

 

They still do them. Avatar 2, 3, 4, and 5 are all being shot right now with actual stereoscopic camera setups.

What I was told (I think the statute of limitations has expired) by the producers of Men in Black 3 was that they ultimately decided that stereoscopic 3D shooting (2 cameras/2 lenses) would not be effective because their cast got impatient with the additional amount of time needed for setup and changing out lenses. Famously, Peter Jackson got around that problem on The Hobbit by having 32 cameras, so he basically could have 16 separate 3D camera set-ups available at any moment, each with a different size lens. If he decided to go for a close-up, the crew could quickly bring in that rig and be ready to go in 5 minutes. If you have to change out lenses on 2 cameras, then check to make sure the 3D alignment is correct and all that stuff, it's basically 15-20 minutes every time. And no zoom lenses.

The problem with shooting in 3D is that the mirror assemblies tend to warp and change over time, so what I've seen -- as happened on the original Avatar -- is the rig gets hot, and so if the camera looks great in one position, then they dolly over to the back of the room for a close-up, suddenly the alignment gets thrown off by 1/4". And that's enough that the 3D starts getting wonky. There were thousands of shots in the original Avatar that required extensive realignment, sometimes where the bottom corner of the frame was screwed up to the left, but the upper right corner of the film was precisely aligned.



The 3D rigs are also very bulky, heavy, expensive, complex, and hard to move around. Having to keep track of double the amount of camera data files is a back-breaking amount of work for the camera crew and post crew. And it's expensive. You also lose a bit of detail and light going through the mirror box at the front of the dual-camera 3D rig.

The advantage of shooting flat and then post-converting to 3D is it's just a regular camera, it's relatively small and lightweight, and you can get in and get out pretty quickly. The flaw with conversion (aka "dimensionalizing") is that it generally doesn't look as good as real 3D stereoscopic photography, plus it costs about $200,000 per finished minute. It also requires that the be completely cut and locked -- meaning no changes permitted -- six months prior to release. That is very hard for directors to accept. Directors love to change things. Shooting in real 3D, you can put the images together more quickly in post.

Michael Bay had some very apt things to say about 3D a few years ago when he made Transformers 3. The gist of it was, "they tell you that it only costs $50,000 a minute to convert to 3D. That's true, except it looks really, really fake and bad. For $100,000 a minute, it starts to looks better, but still pretty bad. You actually have to spend $200,000 per minute to get really, really good results... and for a 2-1/12 hour movie, that's somewhere north of $15 million." Realistically, with the amount of redos and fixes involved, the 3D conversion could easily go to $20 million.

But spending another $20M for 3D is worth it, if you have a movie that grosses (say) $500M and then you make an extra 10% at the box office. Spendng $20M to make $50M is a good deal for everybody... especially the theater owners.

 

That was a dark movie and maybe not the best choice for 3D. Dolby Vision can "save" movies like this by starting off with a lot more light, so by the point you put on the glasses, you're almost back to reasonable brightness.

 

I'm not a fun of D3, I'll start with that, a month ago I bought a new 55'' 4K HDR Samsung set as my previous 40'' Philips 4K set had no HDR but had 3D,the new Samsung doesn't and I'm not gonna miss it.
Despite all of this when I bought movies on BD if a 3D version was available I bought it, it only costs a few bucks more and it was fun to watch the movie at least once on 3D. But the greatest flop I had with 3D was with Rogue One, I watched it twice at the cinema, first time flat and the second time on 3D. The 3D version of Rogue One is unrealistic, lacks sense of depth and even during space battles have no "meat" no real pop, I don't like movies that have stuff continuously jumping out of the screen, but Rogue One 3D is boring. I expected it to look a little better on 3D BD, which I bought (even on major cities, movie theaters in Spain are real crap, no Dolby Atmos, no laser projectors and of course not a single one Dolby Vision cinema room in the whole country), but Rogue One 3D on Blu ray is as flat and boring as it was in theaters, on my former T.V. set it has more ghosting than usual, to add up to the bad 3D experience.
I love Rogue One, I'm pretty sure it looks great and what it needs is a proper HDR/Dolby Vision UHD Blu ray release. As I said, I'm not a fan of 3D.

 

I saw Wonder Woman last night in Dolby Cinema and really enjoyed it. Definitely worth the extra money for me.

 

Michael Bay is the kind of guy who uses 19 different cameras on all kinds of films, so I would bet part of the movie was shot in real 3D, but a lot of it was dimensionalized and anything with digital effects (I'm guessing 1500+ shots) would also have to be dimensionalized.

 

It just amazes me that we can put a camera on the helmet of your "flying squirrel" costume and see sharper-than-sharp cliff-jumping movies on YaTubes; we can put a camera on your Galaxy, then the government can peek in your eyes close enough for a retinal scan while you're watching pr0n...but, when you just want a stereo picture that would have been satisfactory for a ViewMaster reel back in 1958...you still need a billion-dollar camera as big as the Today Show camera they used to use on J. Fred Muggs.

But, at least Michael Bay can justify a $100,000-a-minute shot to turn his Optimus-Primeformers into Yugo's, so I guess that's the win-win in the March Of Technology. Culture is saved!

 

I'm kind of confused what Dolby Cinema/Vision is actually doing. Are movies being "shot" with this format - or is there some group of "Dolby" technicians that takes the existing DCP after it's finished and locked by the studio and then does some sort of additional "Digital Intermediate" color correction work on it?

 

No, Dolby Vision is a post-production process that provides more dynamic range -- brighter highlights and darker blacks -- with every shot. It doesn't necessarily have to be used with 3D; in fact, I prefer flat films released in Dolby Vision. The process is done through a series of decisions in final color mastering. One pass is done for the "regular" color and gamma space, and then another pass is done for Dolby Vision. (In some cases, Dolby Vision is done first, which I think is what Dolby recommends.)

Dolby Vision for theatrical projection works best with laser projectors, which can easily handle the 106-nit peak brightness spec with no problem.

Dolby Vision in the Cinema

This will explain some of the concepts, but be aware (of course) you're not actually seeing Dolby Vision, only an explanation of it:

 

I like Dolby Vision a lot more than XD.

 

XD is kind of vague -- they basically say "bigger screen, brighter picture, bigger sound, nicer seats!" Dolby Vision is essentially just a brighter picture with more color range. But to justify the expense for a laser projector, they generally throw in all the other accoutrements as well.

 

I wonder if there are many Dolby Vision cinema rooms in Europe. As far as I know there is none in Spain.

 

I can only go by the one XD theater and one Dolby Vision theater by me.

The XD screen may be bigger, but the Dolby Vision screen displays a better picture. It is a few years newer than the XD screen, though. The sound is better in the Dolby Vision theater as well, but again it is a newer theater.

 

As far as I know, all the Dolby Vision-certified theaters are using fairly new Christie Laser projectors, since (at the moment) those are the only ones that can hit the brightness specs. I think Barco and Sony are about to unleash 4K laser projectors as well, and Samsung has demonstrated a really huge screen made up of 4K panels -- basically a hundred or more TV sets -- that produce a very bright, cohesive image.

 

Excuse me for my ignorance but I'm curious about codecs used on theatre rooms, in this case Dolby ones.
Is the professional/theater version of Dolby Atmos (or Dolby 7.1 sound) compressed or is it plain PCM? If it's plain PCM it must have metadata to get more channels out of a 7.1 stream. As data storage regarding audio is not an issue today, is Dolby taking the hard route by developing a codec in order to get 11.2 channels (if I'm right and that's the number of channels used on theatre rooms) when they just could use 14 PCM channels properly labeled?
Regarding to picture, again I'm an ignorant about it but I'm sure raw video is not used, it must be compressed in some way. Does the video codec used on Dolby Vision theaters has a name and what is its bitrate and compression ratio? I've never seen a compression artifact while watching a movie at a theatre room, has anybody spot or can see artifacts on the video compression used on comercial Theaters?

 

As far as I know, they're using uncompressed WAV files for sound, but they're multiplexed in with the video. I believe there's been a lossless audio scheme proposed, but I don't know if anybody's using it. The picture files are so massive, the audio hardly matters in terms of size.

The video is compressed using a proprietary version of JPEG2000. The maximum bitrate is 250Mbps, and I think an average 2K feature film is well under 1TB in size (more like 500GB). The codec is dictated by the specs set by the Digital Cinema Initiative:

Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) - DIGITAL CINEMA SYSTEM SPECIFICATION, VERSION 1.2