Just before the show started, Technicolor and Philips announced that they were going to join together to combine and jointly promote their HDR technology. Staff at the Technicolor suite in the Venetian Hotel told us that there had been a realisation that the technology was complementary, with Technicolor particularly strong in content creation and in Hollywood, while Philips has a lot of experience and knowledge on the set side of the business.
The company started by showing us some content that has been re-graded by Francis Ford Coppola to be shown on an OLED HDR display – the content looked very good and Technicolor has a good relationship with LG for content optimisation. (The new version of Apocolypse Now looked very good – Man. Ed.)
Technicolor claims that six chip vendors can now supply SoCs with its technology integrated (Marvell, MStar, Sigma and ST were identified) and that its change to its specification to allow the option of a “single layer” distribution model had made the technology more attractive. The company also told us that it is capable of taking in content with either HLG (BBC & NHK proposal) or ST2084 EOTF (PQ) and can pre-process at the encoding step to allow such content to pass through its system. There was a demonstration of a number of streams of HDR content, and Technicolor claimed that one of the demonstrations showed that the HLG system could distort colours in ways that its own system does not.
Technicolor has “intelligent tone mapping” that can be used for re-mastering of SD content for HDR and this algorithm can be supplied either for use in silicon or for use as a plug-in. The firm said that the technology is based on the Hollywood that won the 2015 Lumière Award from the Advanced Imaging Society for “outstanding technologies that advance the entertainment industry.”
(Unfortunately, our shot of the re-graded content didn’t come out well, but AVS Forum has a good one – http://tinyurl.com/hmzuaqq)
