We met with Dolby in its hotel suite at IFA and reported on that meeting in our IFA report. At IBC, Dolby was highlighting the “Maui” 32″ display showing Dolby Vision content that we saw in Berlin. We had the chance to catch up with Pat Griffis (Executive Director, Technology Strategy, Office of the CTO at Dolby), who is on the Executive Committee of SMPTE and closely involved in standardisation.
Griffis was keen to point out that SMPTE ST 2084:2014 was published on 10th September and this standardises the Electro-Optical Transfer Function that is in Rec 2020 to match better the brightness of video to human vision. He told us that while gamma was a good way of matching signals to the eye at low brightness, it really doesn’t work at high brightness. This is important because Dolby went “back to basics” when it decided to work on a system for better video.
Rather than working from content backwards to the viewer, the company did a lot of basic research to find out what people wanted in terms of video performance. It found that, given freedom to choose the brightness and contrast they wanted to look at, some chose peak brightness as high as 10,000cd/m
