EP014: A Discussion With Dolby’s Nate McFarlin

01:00:00:02 - 01:00:25:12
Joey
Hi, and welcome back to The Offset Podcast. This is part one of a two part series where we'll be talking with Nate McFarlin from Dolby. Over these next two episodes, we'll talk with Nate about his engineering background, his role at Dolby, and of course, we'll be exploring the Dolby Vision ecosystem in detail. Stay tuned.

01:00:25:14 - 01:00:46:23
Robbie
This episode is sponsored by our friends Flanders Scientific, who are leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, editor, DIT or broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has professional display solutions to meet your needs. Learn more at Flanders scientific.com.

01:00:47:01 - 01:00:48:03
Joey
Hey guys, I’m Robbie Carman. and I'm Joey D’Anna.

01:00:48:05 - 01:01:06:09
Robbie
And welcome back to another show. And Joey, this week we're talking about something that I think, to all of those who have met us, know us, have been unfortunately stuck in a cab with us or something similar. no, that we like to talk about a lot and I mean a lot. Underline that, bold it exclamation point at the end.

01:01:06:11 - 01:01:34:10
Robbie
And that is, Dolby Vision, right. Dolby Vision is a, technology platform. whole deal. from the guys at Dolby. and it's often paired with another related technology. It's called Dolby Atmos. and both of these technologies, I don't know, I think first came to my mind probably in the 20 1516 ish range, maybe a year or two plus or minus from there.

01:01:34:12 - 01:02:05:01
Robbie
and, you know, at the time we were just coming off of the, the PTSD that was, stereo, stereoscopic 3D, projects. Right. and all that entailed. And it was like, finally we're back to regular old, boring SDR television. And then what happened? We got this bug and we got bit by this thing called Dolby Vision and HDR for and literally for the past eight years, it's not been you know, that's all we think about and talk about and and do.

01:02:05:01 - 01:02:05:16
Robbie
Right.

01:02:05:18 - 01:02:36:11
Joey
Yeah. And I think, you know, a big part of that is the image quality behind it. Right. We we we both I think kind of saw stereoscopic in television at least as kind of gimmicky. You know, we've talked at length about higher resolutions and frame rates being kind of gimmicky as well. You know, in any reasonable screen size and viewing distance combination, a human being can't perceive the difference between, say, UHD or 4K and HD.

01:02:36:13 - 01:02:58:02
Joey
But and I think a lot of people were expecting the next jump in image quality to be analogous to when we went from SD to HD. But even when we went from SD to HD, we didn't really improve calorimetry. Overall. Image quality, dynamic range, we just made the resolution bigger. This when HDR came and Dolby Vision came into our world.

01:02:58:02 - 01:03:18:21
Joey
Yeah, it was kind of it's it's a an entirely new way of encoding, transmitting and displaying an image that allows us to have such a higher perceived level of quality and accuracy that it just both of us got immediately excited by the possibility, because you can't look at it and not.

01:03:18:21 - 01:03:20:05
Robbie
Not be in impressed by it right? Yeah.

01:03:20:06 - 01:03:31:22
Joey
If it's your eye at this point, most people have seen HDR, but everybody, when they see HDR for the first time, it's like when they saw HDTV for the first time. It's just that drastic.

01:03:32:00 - 01:03:53:08
Robbie
We use that phrase a lot of better pixels. And I think that, you know, as a catchall for what HDR and specifically Dolby Vision is doing, I wouldn't include Atmos, but that's not pixels, that's sound waves. But in general, it's better for technology, it's better pixels, better audio. It's, and we use a lot of different analogies that I'm sure we'll talk about today.

01:03:53:08 - 01:04:14:10
Robbie
But, you know, the wide end of the funnel, it's the most the most bits or whatever you want to throw everywhere where you want to say it. it allows you to kind of master at the best possible technical quality and go from there. And yeah, I mean, right around the time we got interested in it and we were lucky enough, you and I, to both be, writers and presenters for a series that, the Dolby Institute did.

01:04:14:10 - 01:04:40:06
Robbie
We got hired by the guys at the Dolby Institute to do a a primer on, Dolby Vision. and this was kind of, you know, again, the early days of Dolby Vision, and we were, we were lucky enough to do that. And that was really kind of the bug kind of got planted in us. And through that, we were able to obviously, carry on to do a bunch of HDR projects, and we remained close with the guys at Dolby, to the point where we'd like to talk to them all the time.

01:04:40:06 - 01:04:58:04
Robbie
We're on their podcast. They're now on our podcast. And to that, to that end, we are very lucky today to have, a good friend, and, I would just say one of the smartest people I know, Nate McFalin from Dolby. Nate, welcome to the offset podcast. We'r e super glad to have you, man.

01:04:58:06 - 01:05:06:18
Nate
Hey, Robbie, Joey, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. Can't wait to chat. And we need to hire you guys again. That was such a great pitch. I don't I don't even.

01:05:06:19 - 01:05:34:17
Robbie
I don't think any I don't think either one of us would say I would say no to that opportunity. So let's make it happen. so Nate is, a senior content engineer over at Dolby. he specializes in commercial partnerships. which means that he is talking to, the likes of Sony and LG, LG and FSI and canon and all the partner companies that are out there, that, are in the general, you know, kind of the Dolby Vision ecosystem.

01:05:34:17 - 01:05:57:15
Robbie
But I guess, Nate, let's before we get into all the, the particulars of, you know, Dolby Vision and, you know, all that kind of stuff. I just want to know, like what? Who you are. What's your background? How did you get here? What's this path? I mean, because I think that, you know, we are so used to talking about or talking about and talking to people on our end of the industry, right?

01:05:57:15 - 01:06:22:12
Robbie
The creatives, the button pushers, the people stuck in suites that I think it's, you know, there's kind of, like what you do when what your team does is kind of like this ambiguous thing, right? It's kind of like, oh, yeah, those are just the guys at Dolby, and we don't really quite understand all of that. And I mean, from talking to you over the years, I know, and some of your colleagues too, I mean, it's kind of a mix of science and math and technology and service and and all of that.

01:06:22:12 - 01:06:26:19
Robbie
So just tell us a little bit about yourself and you know, what you do at Dolby in that kind of stuff.

01:06:26:21 - 01:06:47:10
Nate
Sure. Yeah. I can I can give a the 20ft background. so I first kind of became interested in the whole like, film industry when honestly, I was in like middle school and high school right around the time YouTube started to become like a big scene. And I was really into kind of, you know, like sort of short film, sci fi stuff, like, I'm a big Star Wars nerd.

01:06:47:10 - 01:06:52:12
Nate
I'm a Trekkie. and I followed a few folks back in the day that would do that, sort of, you know.

01:06:52:12 - 01:06:53:16
Robbie
Fan film kind of things.

01:06:53:17 - 01:07:13:11
Nate
Yeah, absolutely. I'm on YouTube, but I always kind of found myself being more interested when they would put out like weeks after the actual film would be released, the kind of behind the scenes, like technical stuff. And I always thought post-production was super cool. And then I started following people like Freddy W and Video Copilot, like Andrew Kramer's awesome, and getting really into kind of that side of the fence.

01:07:13:11 - 01:07:32:05
Nate
And I still remember, I think I was like a sophomore junior in high school when my dad first bought me my first, like, dSLR, and I was so pumped and I would just run around and, you know, shoot little goofy videos with my friends at the time. so when it came time to kind of look for colleges, you know, initially I was kind of thinking more of that traditional film route.

01:07:32:07 - 01:07:53:12
Nate
but I was also kind of had a pretty, you know, vested interest in kind of math and science as well as my background. And, my father actually worked at a university with this big tuition exchange list at the time. And so we would go through all these different schools. And one of the ones that had popped up that actually my brother had visited years, past that he didn't end up going to was RIT or Rochester Institute of Technology.

01:07:53:14 - 01:08:13:21
Nate
and when we were doing some more digging there, they had this really cool, kind of groundbreaking, honestly, program called Motion Picture Science, which, on paper sounded like the best of both worlds. And so, you'll hear me refer to that as going forward just because it's easier as an acronym. But NPS is really cool in that it kind of bridges that creative and technical gap.

01:08:13:21 - 01:08:34:20
Nate
Like you were just talking about Robby, in the sense that you do get kind of traditional film, you know, classes like production, scripting and things like that. But then you also get on the engineering side, more of the scientific foundation, things like optics, radiometer, color science, you know, sensor design, all the things that kind of make that film industry tick.

01:08:34:20 - 01:08:50:10
Nate
And it's kind of been awesome to go through that. And it was a really, really tight knit group of people that only less than 15 students every year. and usually by the time you graduate, it's drop down. So I think in my graduating class, I want to say there was maybe 9 or 10 of us. but it's been really cool.

01:08:50:10 - 01:09:21:08
Nate
It's really kind of a new program. I believe the first graduating class was in 2010 or 11, I believe, and it was started by, a couple of ex, imaging engineers at Kodak, actually. Right. So, it worked out really well. And it's been really cool since I graduated, in 2016, which I'm now realizing is a lot longer ago than if you're like, but it's really cool because in this industry, you know, you guys know, obviously it's a fairly niche industry compared to a lot of other fields, but it's really awesome to see how often I interact with other RIT grads.

01:09:21:08 - 01:09:23:21
Nate
I mean, I think we have at least 7 or 8 of us at Dolby.

01:09:23:21 - 01:09:48:01
Robbie
I was I was going to say, I mean, the funny thing about this, Nate, is that like, I feel that everybody that I know that legitimately calls themselves and, color scientists, let's be clear, there's plenty of people who call themselves color scientists who have no education about this, but the actual color scientists that I know, they all went, all right, you know, and they they all have this math background and stuff like that.

01:09:48:01 - 01:10:05:07
Robbie
And it's like it's gotten to the point where it's just like if somebody says color scientists, the next thing out of my mouth is, so did you go to RIT? And almost every time the answer is yes, I went to it. And then they know. They know you and you know, Holly Hill and all these colleagues of yours.

01:10:05:07 - 01:10:26:01
Robbie
Oh, yeah. Sure. Good friends with them, you know. So that small world is it. But like, let me ask you a little bit about that experience, because I think this is something that, you know, many of our listeners might not be aware of because I think that traditional film school, right. As you as you mentioned, you know, kind of whether it be, you know, the writing part of it or the producing part of it or the technical part of like we do as colors, that's more familiar.

01:10:26:01 - 01:10:47:12
Robbie
But like, I think one of the questions I had was that I, I was terrible at math in high school. Right? Like, I got, like, D's in math, but I was good at science, right? I was good, like, when the math was applied. So whatever, physics, chemistry, that kind of stuff. I was good to those, you know, maybe some of our younger listeners or, you know, people who have kids that are maybe about to go to college.

01:10:47:14 - 01:10:59:14
Robbie
Like, is that a is that a barrier to success at a school? Like, right. Like if I am just like a little math phobic, but I hear it's all about math. Like, is there a place for me there? Like, can I, can I make it, in the school like that?

01:10:59:16 - 01:11:18:08
Nate
Yeah, totally. I mean, right, definitely. I mean, I won't lie and say that it's not like an engineering technical focus school. so I think the, the baseline kind of math prerequisites for the NPS program, for example, were just calc and physics. you know, a lot of that you get you know, I took both, I took calc as an AP in high school, but then I actually took it again just to get a refresher during college.

01:11:18:08 - 01:11:41:02
Nate
And the physics, you know, was relatively not too crazy. And you're kind of those are the good thing about those are those are kind of more general elective classes. So you're in a big class and you have a lot of people to kind of help you out with. I, I'd actually argue that it gets a little more scary when you actually get into like the core things like radiometric optics, Fourier mass type things that sound super scary and rightfully so.

01:11:41:02 - 01:11:52:22
Nate
They are, but it's funny because you'll realize that when you get into the real world, depending on the path you take. Like, I can't tell you. The last time I thought about Fourier mathematics, right? Like it doesn't. It never enters my brain. and I'm happy.

01:11:53:00 - 01:12:05:08
Robbie
We'll see it. See, Joey, on the other hand, he he audience classes at like MIT and stuff with Fourier transforms and whatnot. Like, do you just take a nuclear physics class at or like at MIT or something?

01:12:05:10 - 01:12:30:00
Joey
I did well, yes and no. They, I I'll say this, slightly off topic, but somewhat on topic is MIT not all RIT has a very cool online program where their advanced classes are just given out to the public, and you can download videos of all the lectures, all the assignments and everything. So if you are looking at getting some science education, that's a cool thing as well.

01:12:30:00 - 01:12:53:04
Joey
But yeah, I love I love that stuff. And I was bad at math too. my brother is is a basically career mathematician, computer scientist at a very, very high level. And he used to always say, still says basically that nobody's actually bad at math. There's just a lot of really, really bad math teachers.

01:12:53:09 - 01:12:54:07
Robbie
Okay.

01:12:54:09 - 01:13:15:13
Joey
Sure. And I kind of believe that because it was never presented to me in a way that got me interested. Yeah. And now as an adult, I'm looking at a lot of things that I find really, really interesting that have a mathematical basis to them and wishing I had learned more fundamental math, calculus, differential equations and stuff like that.

01:13:15:15 - 01:13:26:02
Joey
Trigonometry. you know, I, I wish I had taken that much more seriously when I was younger, getting that foundational knowledge, because now I'm like, well, this actually can lead me into some relief.

01:13:26:02 - 01:13:28:01
Robbie
Well, that's it sounds like me. Like I buy these.

01:13:28:01 - 01:13:28:18
Joey
I know.

01:13:28:19 - 01:13:47:23
Robbie
I buy these books, right? Like color science books and like, I'm thinking, like, you know, Charles Pointon or, you know, whatever, right, Mark? And it's like, can I get into them? And I'm all stoked about them, and it's like, I get through. I then I open the book and I realize that, like, there's only actually about 800 words in the book, right?

01:13:48:04 - 01:14:13:11
Robbie
The rest of it is just aren't your math. And so I think that, you know, it's interesting that you had that experience because, you know, I think that one of the scary things for people who admire that level of knowledge is, is the math part about it. And I think that, you know, having come to know you and some of your colleagues over the years, it's really interesting that, like, you know, for the average colorist, it's not about necessarily mastering that math, right?

01:14:13:11 - 01:14:25:02
Robbie
It's more about being understanding the the higher level version of it, that the general flow of it. But nobody's asking us to, you know, go out and win the Fields Medal as a colorist and understand.

01:14:25:02 - 01:14:46:11
Joey
Yeah. And I think that's a really important distinction to to draw is because, like you said, I get into these scientific hobbies of researching this stuff a little bit, and I wouldn't say I can do any of the math, like if you were to put in front of me formulas to derive and actually figure out usable solutions to measure data and stuff like that, I would be lost.

01:14:46:15 - 01:14:58:09
Joey
But if you ask me some of the more fundamental questions of what does this represent and why does this happen, I can get a pretty good understanding of it. So there's kind of that that gradient there.

01:14:58:11 - 01:14:59:04
Robbie
Yeah, that's pretty cool.

01:14:59:04 - 01:15:20:06
Nate
I think that's a really important distinction to make though too, is that like being creatives that understand that at like a very high level is super valuable. and I will say to your point, Robbie, there's like a black hole of knowledge that you could go down where it's like, you know, it's funny because I have I have, you know, friends that were close colleagues of mine at RG that I know very well that are now like imaging vision scientists and Apple or Netflix.

01:15:20:06 - 01:15:36:16
Nate
And, you know, we have some, you know, like Jacqueline Pitt is one that comes to mind who's like a brilliant, accomplished color scientist and vision researcher on Dolby staff. And, you know, her level of color science compared to me, even though we went through the same curriculum, is like, yeah, all the difference, right? All these different, you know, focus areas, you could go, right?

01:15:36:19 - 01:15:57:04
Nate
Actually, you know, the only color science I took it, it was just kind of the required core material. But they actually have a whole master's and even a PhD program. If you really wanted to go down the rabbit hole of color science, which I have, you know, I have friends like I think of like Ben Bodner comes to mind, an extra like, LG, Apple, who did the Masters and he's a great and one of the smartest guys I know.

01:15:57:04 - 01:16:11:08
Nate
So it's it's really kind of a you can choose your own destiny kind of thing with, with that degree, which I think is really cool. I mean, we have people that went, you know, did the scientific bachelor's degree, but then still ended up doing, you know, like creative filmmaking careers. Right?

01:16:11:08 - 01:16:15:01
Joey
So I'm sure that that technical background is a very good foundation for them.

01:16:15:03 - 01:16:41:13
Nate
Absolutely. No. And that and that was kind of the whole mantra when we were learning is that like, hey, this is a really tight knit group. This is a family here. And if you really kind of focus and do the due diligence, like this is going to set you so far ahead, you know, when you graduate. And it's really cool to see now that companies, you know, source rank grads very aggressively and to the point now where because so many of us have gone through the curriculum now, now some of the older alums are in hiring positions that will hire straight from.

01:16:41:13 - 01:16:54:16
Nate
Right. Right. So it's kind of it's it's been really cool to see that, you know, again, I think I mentioned this earlier, but I laugh at how often that I run into rat grads. I mean, like, I think of, like every time I talk to the Netflix guys, right? Like three out of the four people on their team are art grads, right?

01:16:54:16 - 01:16:56:12
Nate
So it's it's cool to say, yeah.

01:16:56:14 - 01:17:11:21
Robbie
Well, I mean, it's also just very cool to me that that background, I mean, obviously I've expressed to you before, it's something that I kind of, admire. Like, I want more of that in my life, but I, you know, the more that I think about it, it's, it's it's also for those, you know, who might be thinking about going down that path.

01:17:11:22 - 01:17:33:20
Robbie
I think the program that you did and the way that you've described it here and have described it to me in the past is really interesting because it is that more of kind of creative and technical, I think about, what's his name is named Joseph. some is that it was yeah. Yeah, the photo cam, who's the color scientist and, you know, just thinking about his interaction with some of the top colorists in the world, right.

01:17:33:20 - 01:17:54:20
Robbie
And like that back to what those discussions must be like back and forth between him and DP's and gaffers and him and colorists and like that creative collaboration that exists simultaneously, you know, with the math and the science and all kind of stuff. it's pretty fascinating. So, yeah, I mean, I would definitely encourage people to, to check out the art program.

01:17:54:20 - 01:17:58:07
Robbie
So you did it. Then what happened? Where did you go after that?

01:17:58:12 - 01:18:22:13
Nate
Yeah, sure. So I graduated in 2016. my thesis was a, actually involved. it was called resolution enhancement via display vibration. So my partner Max and I thought it would be cool to stick a motor on the back of a display, vibrate it really fast, and run a bunch of psychophysical experiments to see if it actually could give off the perception of higher resolution, which we joke about nowadays, because that that core idea is actually in a lot of products nowadays.

01:18:22:13 - 01:18:25:00
Joey
It's like you're going to ask, did it?

01:18:25:02 - 01:18:27:14
Nate
yeah. So pixel shift projectors, you might have heard of that.

01:18:27:16 - 01:18:28:22
Robbie
Oh yeah. Yeah, sure.

01:18:29:00 - 01:18:45:21
Nate
similar concept. but yeah. No, that one really. Well, so senior year was awesome. And then actually both of us got hired together to go to Imax in LA. So we worked on their post-production mastering team. So again, when I, you know, went through it, I was thinking that, oh, I kind of want to go the more, you know, generic film route, right.

01:18:45:21 - 01:18:59:16
Nate
And do kind of the whole post-production visual effects that was still kind of where a lot of my core interests lie. But with my thesis, I was kind of diving more into like the display technology standpoint. so we're try max for a year. Did a lot of the mastering for them, got to work on some really cool projects?

01:18:59:16 - 01:19:17:17
Nate
I was 2016 and 2017, so that was like the year of Rogen and Doctor Strange, like some really cool movies, that came out that we were able to work on there. And then a year later, I actually got, my job at canon. so I was there for four years, but that was really cool. And that completely shifted my direction from post-production.

01:19:17:17 - 01:19:37:12
Nate
Now, more hardware focused where, you know, things like calibration and instrumentation tuning and repair, like all all became very prevalent. and want to trade my time at canon for the world, got to travel the world, meet some really cool people. And again, to your point earlier was a lot of this kind of intersection of, you know, how do we best make hardware that meets the creative's needs?

01:19:37:12 - 01:19:54:09
Nate
And being able to kind of talk that talk and have more of the you know, I joked, by the time I left, I felt like I was wearing two hats where I was an engineer on, you know, by training, but kind of an account manager by necessity. Right. Where I was always going on these like sales calls and demos and got to meet some really awesome people.

01:19:54:11 - 01:20:12:10
Nate
and then, in 21, just after Covid, there was actually a vacancy at Adobe for someone on the commercial partnerships team, which I am on now. And they were looking for someone with display technology calibration experience. and I remember telling my wife at the time, I'm like, this would be silly for me not to apply like it just associate.

01:20:12:10 - 01:20:12:14
Nate
Right?

01:20:12:18 - 01:20:13:21
Robbie
So but yeah.

01:20:13:23 - 01:20:16:19
Nate
And yeah. And so I've been here for three years and I absolutely love it.

01:20:16:21 - 01:20:36:11
Robbie
So what's day to day like then for you Adobe I mean obviously you're you know, I just you know, just let everybody know, I got to spend a quality amount of time with Nate, at this past year's NAB, we were both sitting in at a, how should we say, extremely small room slash booth, a comfy room, but an offshoot from the Flanders scientific booth.

01:20:36:11 - 01:20:49:08
Robbie
And we're talking about, displays and color management stuff, which was a lot of fun, but, like, what's, you know, what's you know, I know you travel a lot. You're at trade shows, talking to partners and stuff, like, but what's your what's your you know, your average day Adobe. Like what are you what are you doing.

01:20:49:10 - 01:21:04:01
Nate
Yeah. No it's a great question. So I kind of wear multiple hats and it's very similar to how it was at canon for me actually, where again, a lot of my background in day to day tasks are kind of more engineering related around Dolby Vision support. How does the algorithm work? How can we improve that talking to customers?

01:21:04:01 - 01:21:36:06
Nate
But the core of what we do is support. So again, a lot of training, education initiatives we're constantly building. We're in a really cool spot right now. We're HDR and but we vision is growing at like a crazy fast pace. And the momentum there is ever increasing. so we're really looking at how can we kind of scale the sort of knowledge that we have because again, it is like you guys said, it's kind of these niche and niche, field and, and sort of, you know, algorithms and things that guide our processes, but just disseminating that information into very digestible things.

01:21:36:06 - 01:22:06:09
Nate
As we continue to scale into new markets like social media and education and all these different intersections. I mean, we have Dolby Vision in cars now, which is just crazy to think about. so we have a lot of cool momentum there, but that requires really, you know, a lot of, you know, differentiation in the way we've done training because, you know, speaking to what you said earlier in the podcast is like back in 2015, 2016, it was so new that it was all kind of very white glove in the sense that, you know, we would take pulsars around.

01:22:06:09 - 01:22:07:10
Nate
And for those who are.

01:22:07:12 - 01:22:33:21
Robbie
Let's, let's, let's start there. I mean, I think that's, that's a it's a good segue into kind of like a little bit about the origins of DV where, where it is currently, where it's going because, I mean, I think there's, there's a lot of people, believe it or not, who are just getting into DV, even though it is, a little more mature or, you know, it's nurture now, compared to where it was, you know, and Joey and I, as I was we said when we started off the show, you know, we got interested in it because, of two things.

01:22:33:21 - 01:22:57:01
Robbie
It was kind of like the next we saw kind of the path of like, not this is the next big thing because we saw it. We're like, we're floored by it. but, you know, our we started getting to Detroit and I'm trying to remember about this a little bit because it was a while back. But I remember, you know, I think I had first heard of Bright Side Technologies, which was going down this avenue of, you know, looking into HDR displays.

01:22:57:03 - 01:23:13:12
Robbie
And just to be clear, I think that HDR is something for a lot of people that is not new per se. And what I mean by that is, HDR, AI, HDR imaging has been around for a long time where we take, you know, multiple exposures of something. We merge them together to have kind of,

01:23:13:14 - 01:23:15:19
Joey
The perception of the SDR image.

01:23:15:21 - 01:23:31:09
Robbie
Yeah, the perception, the perception and a higher dynamic range. But we're still forcing it down a standard dynamic range pipe. And it seems like, you know, initially bright. And then when Adobe acquired some of that technology and continued on with a lot of the research, which, by the way, I, I get five bucks for every time I say this.

01:23:31:09 - 01:24:02:14
Robbie
But I think a lot of people think about Dolby as like just like a licensing company. And that's certainly part of your guy's business model. But at their heart, it's a research and development company. Right. And I think that that was you know, that was really interesting when Brightside was acquired and you guys, you know, had some of this technology now and the work that went on, I think, you know, from talking to some of your colleagues over the years and kind of the the mandate was we need to create technologies that better, you know, imitate or replicate the real world viewing experience.

01:24:02:14 - 01:24:24:21
Robbie
Right? Like when you go outside and it's a bright, sunny day and you're seeing, you know, Chrome coming off a bumper at nine bajillion nits, right? Like, eventually we can get that. And also recognizing that where we've been to date with SDR television has been very limited. Right. And I remember, you know, this is when I started getting into this, I remember being at any one year giving some classes at Post-production World, which was a big conference.

01:24:24:23 - 01:24:40:08
Robbie
And somebody came up to me and after it was like, hey, I was just out on the show floor and I didn't see you were talking about HDR, but I didn't see any HDR cameras, one of those coming out. Right. And I kind of like kind of gave the kind of side eye and I'm like, they're already out.

01:24:40:08 - 01:24:53:23
Robbie
And he's like, what do you what do you mean they're already out? I'm like, every camera that you record or like everything, the camera was right. Everybody's well worth 15 stops. We're 16 stops. We're all I'm like, so those cameras have been able to do that for the longest time?

01:24:53:23 - 01:24:58:08
Joey
Yeah. HDR has existed in the camera space since the 1800s. Right.

01:24:58:08 - 01:25:20:15
Robbie
Exactly, exactly. So I started, you know, started it started getting into it. And I think I want to start this part of the conversation at something you hinted at a minute ago, is that in 2015, 16, 17, that range there, I got the impression that Dolby Vision was very I like to say this in a fun way, hopefully not disparaging way to Dolby, but it was a country club technology.

01:25:20:17 - 01:25:43:06
Robbie
And what I mean by that was that like only the top facilities in the world were doing Dolby Vision or HDR in general, because it was this technology that was, very heavily, I don't know, what's the word very curated by you guys, I guess. Right. And you got there was a lot of decisions about who's going to be able to get this and who's being able to use it.

01:25:43:06 - 01:26:01:15
Robbie
And I'm thinking of, you know, the programs, the films, the company threes, you know, the, the all those kind of big time players. Right? Yeah. So what happened like, was that a testing ground for Dolby Vision? Like, like I'm a little guy. That's part of the the history of Dolby Vision. I'm a little vague on. Right.

01:26:01:15 - 01:26:11:23
Robbie
Is that like, it sort of makes sense to put this technology in the best hands of the best people in the world. But how did it eventually get out to the wider world? You know, what's the what's the history there?

01:26:12:01 - 01:26:31:22
Nate
Yeah, yeah. No. Great question. and my colleagues, Tom and Avi, who are involved from the get go, could probably give a better perspective than I, but I would actually back it up even a little more than 2015 and say kind of with the advent of PCU. And I believe if I'm remembering my hands, are those 2014. So Dolby did a lot of research into, you know, how the human eye perceives things.

01:26:31:22 - 01:26:51:22
Nate
Like, again, you mentioned, you know, almost everything we do is perception based in the sense that we want things to mimic the human interaction that you perceive in the real world. So I can give you guys some great images for this, but we have these really cool labs in San Francisco that will measure all sorts of human brainwaves, interactions, things like that, when displayed with certain kinds of content.

01:26:51:22 - 01:27:10:05
Nate
So, you know, an analogy, an example we like to show here is like for HDR, for example, some of the very, very early prototypes of HDR, reference displays like the pulsar and things that we were building at the time where we would sit somebody down in a chair, connect a bunch of, you know, brainwave monitoring machines, blast them with really bright content.

01:27:10:07 - 01:27:30:20
Nate
and one thing that we found again is that for a fire, for example, we would show something that was brighter than traditional SDR, and we found that there was actually a very real visceral reaction of people where their skin started to get perspiration and, and things like that, where they're actually, you know, viscerally reacting as if they're actually getting heat off of this fire, which of course, we know is not actually the case.

01:27:31:01 - 01:27:32:13
Nate
You know, aside from the heat of the monitor.

01:27:32:13 - 01:27:35:11
Joey
I've got to say, with the pulsar, it might be much like the.

01:27:35:11 - 01:27:49:18
Nate
Pulsar, maybe, but you know what I mean. So a lot of that was done early on. but then it almost became kind of, okay. We've convinced ourselves. Right. But now we have to go show this to the people that are making all of the best content in the world, right? Like all these big post-production studios that you mentioned.

01:27:49:18 - 01:28:09:10
Nate
And at the time, again, not only was it a, kind of a knowledge gap where anyone outside of Dolby didn't really understand how to do it, but there wasn't a lot of hardware, right? Like HDR reference supplies didn't exist at this time. And that's why Dolby said, screw it, we'll do it ourselves. We'll build one. So we prototyped, there's a display called the pulsar, which was, behemoth of a display.

01:28:09:12 - 01:28:25:11
Nate
there's only I believe there was only 20 that were made. There's actually only two there. So left in the field from the last time I checked. But really cool display, but required a ton of additional power. 4000 nits, all this cool stuff. so we would wheel these things around. And, when I say VR, I mean more like Ark of the covenant.

01:28:25:11 - 01:28:47:04
Robbie
Well, it's really it. No, you're no real quick anecdote about that. back in around that time. I forget the year. Exactly, but we had, our facility, we, our audio partners, had become one of the first places in the country, to install, you know, an atmo suite, right. And so we, and we were we were we're good friends with your, your colleague Tom McAndrew on the audio side of things.

01:28:47:04 - 01:29:04:09
Robbie
And so they're like, yeah, well, why don't we do Dolby Vision, too? And I remember your colleague Tom Graham calling said, hey, we want to do this event at you guys studio. here's what we need. I need for 20 amp plugs in your room to plug that. Oh, sorry. And I was like, what? He goes, yeah, I just need for 28 plugs.

01:29:04:09 - 01:29:13:20
Robbie
Right? Wherever we're going to plug them on, I'm like, oh I can't I don't have that. Sorry, buddy. you know, it did it. It was liquid cooled. The Ark of the covenant. look, I like that analogy. It's exactly what it was like.

01:29:14:00 - 01:29:17:23
Nate
It was a behemoth. I mean, in ways like 300 or 400 pounds. It's. It's a lot.

01:29:18:01 - 01:29:25:01
Joey
Yeah. Robbie and I have both been in the presence of the pulsar. fortunately for us. And now, what a cool display.

01:29:25:03 - 01:29:41:06
Nate
Yeah, it's really cool. And I almost, you know, I think of it as a really good success. So, you know, we didn't commercially, you know, manufacture them. And we never really intended it to be that. It kind of served its purpose in the sense that we really wanted to use this, display to showcase what HDR could look like.

01:29:41:06 - 01:29:53:02
Nate
And we were hoping to spur the industry to create better, more streamlined displays and let the companies that are really good at commercial products like Sony can, and all these things take over. And I mean, look at where we are now, just not even ten.

01:29:53:04 - 01:30:08:16
Robbie
Totally. I mean, and that's why I mean, the kind of the, you know, it was it was a technology demo, I guess, if you will, to show this. I mean, and thinking back on it now, it was very impressive because of its brightness, but it was HD only the powered, the.

01:30:08:18 - 01:30:11:06
Nate
Parts of the 12 bit. It was like super.

01:30:11:08 - 01:30:35:17
Robbie
Powered power draw was not going to get energy certification from anybody. Right. right. Like, yeah, all sorts of problems with it. so, you know, as, as that started growing, as you started going around to these larger facilities, they started dabbling in, you know, HDR that's kind of one side of the story, right? But the other side of the story is trying to convince as what you do day to day is trying to convince partners.

01:30:35:17 - 01:31:07:19
Robbie
Right. The Sony is the FSI is the canon's whoever the world to one part, you know, invest in this technology and kind of make this technology. But the third part of that is also trying to get the content creators, the studios and Netflix, etc., to also buy in a little bit. And, you know, I know some of that was a little bit before your time at Dolby, but like in a general sense, can you speak to like, you know what that probably that initiative was and kind of how it's developed now, like how do those conversations go now when you talk to people about, integrating Dolby Vision into their, into their, you know,

01:31:07:19 - 01:31:08:18
Robbie
their workflows?

01:31:08:20 - 01:31:30:17
Nate
Yeah. No. It's great. Again, a great question. I think a lot of it spurred from, you know, not only the availability of content creation tools like, you know, color characters that supported reference displays that can do HDR. But I think the big breakthroughs also came when it became more available on the playback side, when people at home could see it and realize like, oh, wow, that's way closer to what I saw in the grading suite than was previously.

01:31:30:17 - 01:31:49:02
Nate
Right? And I think that was kind of like the big moment. And then when you started to get more and more TV, OEM sign up and then more and more OTT platform signing up and almost just became natural. And from the creative standpoint, you know, when talking to folks like yourself, I think it became easier when we had more robust ways.

01:31:49:02 - 01:32:10:08
Nate
And to show that, you know, it does really, you know, maintain your creative intent. And I think, you know, I don't pretend to play colorist. but I think, you know, as a creative person, that is something that mantra really speaks a lot of volume. Right? Because I would assume that when you guys spend hours, you know, crafting your vision, you don't want it to go get stretched by all this other crazy crap that you have no control over, right?

01:32:10:08 - 01:32:15:02
Nate
At least vision gives you some sense of, you know,

01:32:15:03 - 01:32:33:00
Robbie
What I mean, I think also, I mean, speaking for us personally, I'm sure I'm curious if you had the same, you know, perspective visiting places as well, like in those early days with Dolby Vision. It was fricking complicated, right? For sure. Like, like you, we were at the time, we were working with the external content mapping unit, the ECM.

01:32:33:00 - 01:32:42:03
Robbie
You right. Which was a whole separate server. Hardware server, you know, was a one you supermicro that still in a closet over here in the corner? My room right there.

01:32:42:04 - 01:32:45:20
Nate
license licenses, by the way, I do think people also have.

01:32:45:21 - 01:33:02:15
Robbie
you know, external CM you box that you had to get talking to your color corrector, you had to, you know, dive in the command line, you know, very much so the making of Dolby Vision stuff, right? I'm talking about, you know, the, the, the deliverables, the smells and stuff like that was command line driven really through the professional tools.

01:33:02:15 - 01:33:17:10
Robbie
Not a whole lot of color correctors were supporting it in a way that made it easy to the end colors like it almost to it. Tell me if you agree with this. Like it almost seemed in those early days. Like you were kind of required to have an engineer on staff to make this stuff work.

01:33:17:12 - 01:33:43:00
Joey
Yeah, and I think that does make some sense. You know, given like you said, they wanted to, you know, the first places that adopted were big advanced facilities that had a little bit more engineering support behind them, which hopefully kind of leaves the teams at Dolby the flexibility to collaborate with the engineering side, too, and figure out the best way to integrate this into post-production and encoding pipelines.

01:33:43:02 - 01:34:05:05
Joey
I was just going to mention, you know, just to go back a little bit to the issue of creative intent and accuracy. That, to me is one of the greatest things about PK and Dolby Vision in particular is, yes, in the old SDR days, every consumer playback device was the complete wild, wild West. Now they've gotten so much closer together.

01:34:05:10 - 01:34:22:08
Joey
I think largely because of Dolby Vision. But even to the point of theatricals, I will specifically seek out any movie in Dolby Cinema half because I love the HDR and half because I know the projector has been calibrated this century.

01:34:22:10 - 01:34:23:02
Nate
Right.

01:34:23:04 - 01:34:51:22
Joey
You know, but so yeah, Rob, you, I think you're I think you're absolutely right. The initial user facing tools for Dolby Vision were very technical, especially, you know, you couldn't even make screeners, right. We we dove into this very deeply. Right. We had yeah, we had a license for the Dolby encoding engine software, which is the only way to really make like encoded MP4 is that could playback on consumer devices.

01:34:52:00 - 01:35:11:05
Joey
And when we first got this basically there's there's no user interface. It was designed for cloud computing platforms where you would write your own back end to control it. And that's great for streamers and studios because they're already doing that with their with their workflow teams. We actually had to write our own user interface for that to make our own Dolby codes.

01:35:11:07 - 01:35:40:23
Joey
And we were one of the first, first new, non-major studios to do it. And I remember, Robbie, I told you at the time, I was like, watch, I'm putting we're putting all this work in and it's awesome and we're glad we're doing it. This will be a button and resolve in two years, and it is now. And I think that's wonderful because we started out with everything being tested and operated on and figured out at the very highest end, and then it kind of evolves, evolves, evolves.

01:35:41:01 - 01:36:02:22
Joey
All the kinks get worked out, then it gets more and more presentable to the artist. That doesn't have to have as much of a technical background. Now you can make a very good Dolby Vision encoded screener, MP4 right out of DaVinci resolve, without any kind of drama or difficulty. that wasn't always the case, but I think that that was the logical approach to do it.

01:36:03:00 - 01:36:24:02
Robbie
Yeah, I agree, and I just, I just I'm remembering now, Joey, that I was, when I spoke to, to Nate's colleague, Tom Graham, who's a good friend of ours, and he had called and said, hey, do you want to try this? I thought I had written him about like, how do I create a Dolby Vision? And before I give to a client, he's like, well, you could try out the software, but like, good luck.

01:36:24:02 - 01:36:42:02
Robbie
Basically, I think, I think initially what he gave us, you know, when we got the license and we got the package to install, I think he was like, we'll see you in a couple years when you figure it out. Right? And honestly, if it hadn't been for Joey, like in his computing knowledge and compiling knowledge and all that kind of stuff, it would have never happened.

01:36:42:07 - 01:37:02:02
Robbie
But it was kind of a little bit of defeat because, I mean, for a period of like 18 months, like, Joey was literally the smartest guy on the planet outside of like the, you know, the the Netflix and Amazon, you know, pipelines in the world because he had done this on a computer in his basement and he was making, you know, it was a little deflating when it was like, oh, yeah, that's just a one button down resolved.

01:37:02:02 - 01:37:02:23
Robbie
But that's not.

01:37:02:23 - 01:37:03:15
Joey
Welcomed. It.

01:37:03:18 - 01:37:29:22
Robbie
That's a natural evolution, I suppose. So, you know, I think, you know, we've covered a little bit of this. It makes a lot of sense that we started kind of at the high end, you know, worked out the kinks. It's slowly filtered. And I remember kind of the very first, sort of milestone point that this was going to be a bigger, wider, thing for me was, you know, DaVinci resolve over the past decade or so has grown from this multi hundred thousand dollar system into essentially essentially a free system.

01:37:29:22 - 01:37:53:22
Robbie
There's a free version of it. Right. But the resolved studio at whatever it is, 300 bucks, 400 bucks. I remember when the announcement came out that Dolby Vision was going to be natively supported in, DaVinci Resolve Studio without any additional cost, meaning that you could make a compatible, say, Dolby Vision image with the free version of resolve.

01:37:54:04 - 01:38:18:22
Robbie
And if you needed additional creative control, you could purchase a trim license, which gives you, you still can, by the way. Still purchase that, gives you some additional creative control by, enabling the trim controls and resolve studio. But when I saw that, I was like, well, now here we are. Right? We've gone through trial by fire at the biggest places in the world, and now we have what is, I would have to guess, the most widespread color correction system in use in the world.

01:38:19:00 - 01:38:33:08
Robbie
Now, offering this for free from your guy's perspective at that point, if you can kind of remember back or think back or whatever, like has it been an explosion of content since kind of, you know, that point in time? It seems like it has to me anyway.

01:38:33:09 - 01:38:50:22
Nate
Yeah, totally. I mean, you've mentioned Tom several times already, but he has really great slides that he shows every time we do open houses and things like that, where the momentum is, it's really exploding. obviously some big milestones like you mentioned on the creative side and then also adoption from the OTT platforms, embracing it as the go to HDR format.

01:38:50:22 - 01:39:09:05
Nate
And then, you know, again, our catalog of playback devices that are supporting it. And it always blows my mind, even as someone who works here and interfaces with this stuff every day, it's just like the intersection now between all these different mediums for playback is so exciting. And I think that's, again, akin to all the research that we did up front.

01:39:09:05 - 01:39:29:05
Nate
It's like, you know, if you think of back in the day, it was like you watched stuff on like lamp based projectors or CRT at home. Right? And now it's like you have OLEDs, LCDs, RGB, OLEDs, OLEDs, you know, dual layer single layer LCD. And it's like so many different backlight technologies, but then so many different, you know, formats of like my phone tablets, desktop PCs, like giant TVs.

01:39:29:05 - 01:39:44:03
Nate
LED was like it almost like begged for this kind of format, right? Where it's like there's there's way too much going on. Like we need some sort of, like, hero set of pixels, if you will, to guide all of this together to form the creative vision in a way that is more, you know, akin to that initial intent.

01:39:44:05 - 01:40:07:03
Nate
And I think that's, again, part of the reason why we've seen a lot of success is because as that landscape evolves, it almost, you know, beckons for this sort of kind of control from the creative side. so to your point, yeah, the momentum has been really awesome to see. I mean, I like sharing slides, when I do my trainings and even since I've joined in a few years, I think we were under 20,000 titles globally, and now we're well over 25.

01:40:07:03 - 01:40:18:22
Nate
I think we're actually closer to 30 the last time I checked the numbers. So it's been really cool to see that and kind of, you know, get people like yourselves and others more, you know, directly involved. It's always really gratifying. And again, making.

01:40:18:23 - 01:40:46:00
Robbie
So yeah, I mean, it's also interesting to me, it's it's, you know, and you you hinted on this, but it's also I think a good demarcation point for when a technology is succeeding is when, it's literally in the hands of everybody. Right. And what I mean by that is that like, to me, in the past five, six, seven years, the biggest indoor endorsement of Dolby Vision in general was an iPhone or Android, whatever.

01:40:46:01 - 01:41:07:14
Robbie
Putting DV on mobile devices, pretty much everybody in the world has some flavor of a mobile phone. Many of them new can support Dolby Vision content, and I think that's an exciting part about it. And it's like when I think of Dolby Vision in general, the way that I like to describe it to those who are uninitiated is it's a translation tool, right?

01:41:07:16 - 01:41:42:13
Robbie
It allows you to get similar experiences no matter the medium that you're viewing content on, right? Whether that be a 4000 nit mastering display or whether that be your 300 nit, you know, TV that you bought from Costco that's in your bedroom, right? Like it doesn't matter. DV allows you to go between all of those kind of worlds seamlessly getting a similar creative, intent in a similar experience, whereas we've talked about it like it's just, you know, before it's like, well, this TV is bright, that TV is dark, this is unsaturated, that's desaturate.

01:41:42:13 - 01:42:14:00
Joey
And it's funny, you look at the SDR grading kind of world right now, and if you look at any user group, at any Facebook thing anywhere, all anyone ever talks about is I open up my file in three different players and I pixel peep. And it looks kind of wrong here and kind of wrong here. And people keep saying stupid things like gamma shift and other made up things that, you know, nobody ever figured this out for SDR on the software side and the playback side, right?

01:42:14:01 - 01:42:43:11
Joey
It was never, ever even anywhere remotely solved with SDR and with HDR and Dolby Vision. It is just miles ahead in terms of uniformity of creative intent and display across a wide variety of playback softwares, platforms, streaming services, devices all across the board. And that I think, is the as a colorist, that's the most exciting part. Besides just that, it looks awesome.

01:42:43:11 - 01:42:43:18
Joey
Yeah.

01:42:43:18 - 01:43:03:21
Robbie
I mean, I think a lot about the idea of like a closed loop ecosystem, right? Where like essentially now we have a situation where a colorist, a deep and I'm producer or whatever, sit in a suite in Los Angeles making a big, you know, you know, Disney Plus or Amazon show or whatever. They look at it and they go, okay, cool.

01:43:03:21 - 01:43:38:07
Robbie
Well, if we do our job right and produce this Dolby Vision metadata and the master content correctly, that we can then give that to whoever. And then when they push it out to the TV, it's actually the content telling the TV what to do and how to perform. Right. And how to behave. That kind of closes that loop back to the mastering suite, where it's like we we now content creators now have a fighting chance that the content that they make and they've spent you know, blood, sweat and tears and millions of dollars on it's going to have a fighting chance of looking the way that they want it to when it ends up on,

01:43:38:07 - 01:43:44:03
Robbie
you know, Joe Smith TV at home. Right. And I think that's the first time that's really ever happened, which is super exciting.

01:43:44:05 - 01:44:07:11
Nate
100%. And I think you guys both just spoke about great points. a couple misconceptions that we hear all the time is like, hey, Will my $400 Dolby Vision TV make my TV look like a $30,000 reference monitor? And it's always like, no. But again, what that handshake is doing is that it's giving you confidence that that display will purr or, you know, playback that content as good as it can physically limited.

01:44:07:12 - 01:44:28:15
Robbie
Well, that's that's why I said translation earlier. Right. Is that like and I think it's one of the, the one thing, you know, we can get geeky about this for a second because translation another way of saying that is it is a tone mapping. Right. So and, you know, tone mapping is essentially, you know, getting the, the performance and display characteristics of one set of content or one display and translating that over to another display.

01:44:28:15 - 01:44:49:08
Robbie
Right. So if you have, you know, a 4000 nit rec 2020 master, how is that going to look on a 500 nit, you know, peak enabled television that you got a Costco, that's that translation, that tone mapping to get it to that performance. And yes, there are sacrifices. You're not going to make your $300 TV look like a $30,000 reference monitor.

01:44:49:10 - 01:44:52:15
Robbie
But for the first time, you have a fighting chance of getting it close, right, which I think is.

01:44:52:15 - 01:44:53:20
Joey
Perceptual eclipse.

01:44:53:21 - 01:44:54:21
Robbie
Perceptual goes. Yeah.

01:44:54:21 - 01:45:10:19
Nate
It goes. And you also say right is that, you know, part of the thing that makes us, you know, all of this possible is that we have, you know, these great kids and these great engineers and scientists at Dolby that are working with all of our partners to make sure that, you know, you know, you have to go through testing to do Dolby Vision integration.

01:45:10:19 - 01:45:30:00
Nate
And it's a proprietary ecosystem, which, again, for those who are, you know, less educated on the display side, for SDR, for example, every TV OEM has their own flavor of SDR, like, yes, there is filmmaker mode and other things that help tremendously, but every manufacturer has their own special sauce, right? And it's very similar on the camera side where it's like people will say that.

01:45:30:00 - 01:45:35:20
Nate
People would say all the time when I was a kid and like, oh, I love Canon's color imagery. Like, I love the skin tones that I get on. The canon versus color.

01:45:35:20 - 01:45:37:08
Robbie
Imagery should be color imagery, right?

01:45:37:08 - 01:45:54:23
Nate
Right, right. And again, that's where this kind of, you know, I like your analogy of closed loop is because we're trying to get rid of all of that and make it just, again, as close as you can perceptually to what you did in the mastering suite. And, you know, the cool thing here is that I think, you know, if you look at historically, I think we're as close as we've ever been is a unification.

01:45:55:01 - 01:45:57:02
Nate
It's only going to get better and better, which is and.

01:45:57:02 - 01:46:22:08
Joey
I'll say this, I've done some pretty extensive testing on of wide variety of obviously professional mastering displays, really good consumer displays, down to I won't say bad, but I will say lower cost consumer displays. And just like you said, with SDR, the display does whatever the marketing people and the engineers at the TV company thought looked the best.

01:46:22:10 - 01:46:25:10
Joey
Right. It will do that to your image.

01:46:25:12 - 01:46:31:13
Nate
and that makes sense, right. To think of like if you think about it from the OEM standpoint, it's like, I want to differentiate myself. Like, yeah, you know so and.

01:46:31:15 - 01:46:56:19
Joey
They also and what I think a lot of people don't realize is these TVs also do the same thing with just straight peak content or HDR ten content. Right? They have a peak image of a thousand nits or 4000 nits or whatever they need to display that they're native 300 400 nits. They will tone map that. However, that TV feels like doing it with their own algorithm that will have whatever source that they like the best in it.

01:46:56:21 - 01:47:26:23
Joey
And I'll, you know, when it goes through the Dolby testing process to have the Dolby Vision technology in it, that mapping is dictated by the Dolby Vision standard and by the actual metadata encoded in the master. I've done a b testing of the same content straight PCU on lower cost consumer displays versus with Dolby Vision metadata, and it's night and day like you might not see a drastic difference.

01:47:26:23 - 01:47:48:07
Joey
You probably won't see any difference. Showing a thousand at peak image in Dolby Vision, at a thousand nits on a thousand capable TV because it's not doing any work right. But then you take that to a lower cost display device that only does 3 or 400 nits, that closed loop that we're talking about. I mean, it is drastically better.

01:47:48:09 - 01:47:49:04
Joey
Yeah. Like, yeah.

01:47:49:04 - 01:47:50:04
Robbie
I agree I agree.

01:47:50:08 - 01:48:06:02
Joey
Night and day like I would I would rather watch straight SDR or than most consumer TVs PCU mapping that they do without Dolby Vision. The closed loop aspect of this ecosystem I think is completely key.

01:48:06:04 - 01:48:06:17
Robbie
Yeah, I.

01:48:06:17 - 01:48:24:10
Nate
Agree, I think just drawing attention to that is important. You know, Ravi, like you've seen some of the data that I've shown it maybe in some of our other trainings. there's a great site guardians.com. If you're ever curious about this. They do really extensive TV testing, but they'll actually provide numbers of what luminance levels these certain TV sets are stretching SDR to.

01:48:24:10 - 01:48:31:16
Nate
And it's it's crazy to look at some of the times because again, you think of SDR in your guys's world, that's 100 nits, right? right. And, you know, some of these TVs, one.

01:48:31:17 - 01:48:32:17
Robbie
Thousand nits plus.

01:48:32:17 - 01:48:57:06
Nate
Yeah. Yeah, literally. and from a filmmaker's point of view, again, like, I don't pretend to, you know, live in your guys's world, but, like, if I were me, that would be my worst nightmare, right? Because it's like I spent all this time and now I have almost no control. Whereas like this, to your point, is like, at least now you have a fighting chance or, you know, faith that when you go from all these different mediums that we were talking about, not only like form factor, but different manufacturers, it's going to be a lot more consistent than it would if you just left it up to them.

01:48:57:08 - 01:49:12:11
Robbie
Well, guys, this conversation has been awesome so far. But I'm looking at my notes here and we still have a lot of things that we want to chat with Nate about. So I think what we should do is stop, and make this a part one, and we'll pick up with a part two, in a couple of weeks.

01:49:12:11 - 01:49:33:05
Robbie
So stay tuned for that. as always, I want to thank our sponsor, Flanders Scientific. Without you guys, the show would not be possible. And I also want to thank, Stella, our editor, who makes Joey and I sound intelligible. So, as always, thanks for your help. And, of course, if you're checking the show out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you find it, please like and subscribe to the show.

01:49:33:05 - 01:49:39:19
Robbie
Every like and every subscribe really helps us get the word out about the offset podcast. But for now, thanks for watching.