sblfilms Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 Dolby Reveals Plan to Expand Reach in Premium Theaters VARIETY.COM Prior to the start of CinemaCon, Dolby revealed a plan to expand the reach of Dolby Vision in premium theaters. Very glad to see that the AMC lock on the Christie DV projector is coming to an end. It is currently the best technology for cinema viewing by a wide margin. I am guessing the timing of this is likely due to Barco FINALLY having their competing tech, light steering, ready to ship in projectors this year. These pieces, plus Texas Instruments bringing new DLP chips to the cinema market for the first time in a decade AND the arrival of cost effective 6P laser illumination will be the first real image quality jump in cinema since 2K digital in 2008. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Air_Delivery Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 I like it better than HDR 10 since it seems less over the top Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silentbob Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 Wonder what/if Canada's biggest theatre chain Cineplex will do. We have several “Premium” theatres called AVX theatres. Reclining seats, some D-Box seating, Atmos sound and slightly bigger screen. We pretty much finished the 35mm to digital projectors conversion about 10-11 years ago. I don’t think they can convert the halogen bulb systems to laser, but who knows. I was told they could be upgraded via chip from 2k - 4k, but I doubt they’d do it cause of cost (even if free) @sblfilmsis there a license fee to pay to play/run Dolby Vision/Atmos at you theatres? Maybe a Lucas thing, but there was a fee to advertise you could run THX 20 years ago at least. We qualified for sound (even too a couple trailers, after the digital change) but Famous Players (Viacom company which was sold to Cineplex) didn’t want to pay the fee back then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sblfilms Posted April 4 Author Share Posted April 4 Dolby Vision in cinemas is actually a hardware thing primarily. Christie built a projector, called the Eclipse for non-cinema use, and built a dual projector version of it for Dolby to be used only in Dolby Cinema auditoriums, which in North America is exclusive to AMC. This change will allow DV projectors to be installed in non-Dolby Cinema auditoriums, just like Atmos is available to any premium auditorium (Regal RPX, Cinemark XD, etc.). The software component really is on the mastering side, which like home DV, involves shot by shot HDR manipulation, as opposed to vanilla HDR10 which is a one-size-fits-all method. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sblfilms Posted April 14 Author Share Posted April 14 Barco HDR Projector Pilot Program Launches at CinemaCon (EXCLUSIVE) VARIETY.COM Jerry Bruckheimer, Joe Kosinski are testing Barco's new HDR projector. Barco announced its pilot program at CinemaCon. I went to the HDR by Barco demo at CinemaCon, and I want to be fair to Barco because the demo was in a ballroom that had nothing more than black curtains as the walls. The ceilings were close to white in color, so really reflecting a lot of light back on the screen. That being said, the colors on the material shown were stellar, as were the peak whites. A massive upgrade from Barco's SDR projectors. The area that I still was not super impressed with was the black levels, not really close to what I see in a Dolby Cinema install. But I will allow for the possibility that the apparent elevated black level is largely the result of the poor viewing environment. I really think Barco would have been better off building a blackout box and setting up the theater inside of that, but that might have been hard to get fire marshal approval from in a short week convention time frame. But overall, a great move forward and they aren't quite done with the tech. The first test units will hit theaters later this year and then retail installs Q1 of 2025. The other BIG news is that Barco developed their own box to connect to various color timing software, like Davinci Resolve, that helps colorists create SMPTE standard REC 2020 HDR outputs that are initially automatically rendered shot by shot by the Barco box and then can be manually tweaked by the colorist. This will be huge as getting Dolby Vision certification is a long and costly process, whereas this will be relatively inexpensive and should lead to substantially more films being finished in HDR. The REC 2020 HDR standard is also...standard, so any company that makes an HDR-capable projector in the future will be able to utilize these same DCP files. A big win for consumers, much like the ending of Dolby's grip on object-based audio with the standardization of IAB tracks over the proprietary Atmos format. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silentbob Posted April 14 Share Posted April 14 My theatre went all Christie DLP when we converted to digital. I wonder how fast an HDR upgrade will take to hit mainstream theatres. What projectors do your theatres mainly run on @sblfilms I remember you getting some good deals on a couple laser projectors a while back. I take it that they would be the easiest to update over a Xenon/Osram bulbs Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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