Who Framed Roger Rabbit 4K UHD (1988)

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Adam4Rizzel

Here’s a question: Why would studios pay licensing fees to Dolby if HDR10 offered the same amenities? Why would there be a development of HDR10+ if HDR10 was superior? Dynamic metadata contains more metadata overall than static metadata.

Go get a roll of 24 or 36 exposure film and put it on the scanner. You can dial in one set of exposure settings, one set of color settings, and one set of contrast settings for the whole roll and scan every frame with the same settings or you can go in and individually fine tune each frame with its own settings. That’s the difference between HDR10 and Dolby Vision.

My bias is towards releases, on disc, with Dolby and HDR10+ presentations, when such film has been graded for that format. I wish they would include DV on this disc. The DV grade, on this disc, would be the definitive version.

Dolby Vision is not a grading system, it's a metadata system. The HDR content itself has been graded from shot to shot, scene to scene, just like any other piece of content which would be digitally graded. Once the grade is finalled it's fed into an automated system which analyses the image and creates the metadata, both static and dynamic. With DV they can manually adjust the metadata (unlike 10+) when looking at whatever trim pass e.g. 100-nit 709 SDR to ensure that the mapped version looks as it should, but this is NOT adjusting the grading of the finalled HDR master at source, merely how it's being interpreted by the metadata when set to a certain trim pass.

When it comes to how target displays interpret absolute luminance HDR content then yes, dynamic metadata is far more flexible than static but its importance is waning as more and more displays feature their own dynamic analysis of the image itself, not just relying on the static metadata numbers to apply an ill-suited tone map. If anything dynamic metadata is more important the further down the line you go in terms of the quality of the display's processing, as older premium sets and supermarket specials aren't always great at tone mapping so they need that guiding hand of dynamic metadata.

Dolby does have other advantages that still endear it to me no matter what display it's being viewed on, like FEL rebuilds of poorly compressed base layers, but even this system is not used by all when it comes to UHD disc and it is not used by streaming DV at all, where you're basically watching a 10-bit stream upsampled to 12-bit with dynamic metadata embedded.