Dolby Vision Now Leaves DRTs In RCM Up To Colorists’ Discretion

It was around a month ago that we reached out to the super-helpful Nate McFarlin, Sr. Content Engineer at Dolby Laboratories, to ask why it is that Dolby insists upon setting input and output DRTs to NONE in RCM, to which he replied that it was to avoid any of Resolve’s color science from being applied. 

Anyhow, we never did learn how it is that we’re supposed to work in RCM without any DRTs, and just the other day, we discovered that we weren’t alone. At the urging of our Facebook group member Rob Trombino, we tuned in to a Mixing Light video tutorial entitled “LUTs, Color Management, HDR and Cinema Workflows” featuring Kali Bateman, Zeb Chadfield, Peder Morgenthaler and Mixing Light CEO Patrick Inhofer, where someone had asked how to grade in RCM without DRTs. As it happens, not a single person on the show was even aware that Dolby insists on setting DRTs to NONE in Resolve – and that includes Kali Bateman, a Dolby Vision certified colorist who’s worked on acclaimed films such as Elvis and Dune. Not only that, but according to one of the participants in the live stream, DaVinci Resolve certified trainers had a master class from Dolby in Europe and both DRTs were set to DaVinci. Anyhow, to make a long story short, everyone advised just setting input and output DRTs to DaVinci. We brought this to the attention of Nate yesterday, and received this response today: 

“Thanks for reaching out – this is good intel for us and well timed. We’ve had some meetings to discuss this topic and have decided to change our stance on this in our upcoming training materials (full Resolve video series to launch very soon and updated Resolve quick start guide already published).

You’ll see in some of our materials/screenshots that we have these set to none but we’re advising that the selection of the DRT settings is completely up to a user’s preference. Ultimately, this is a Resolve color management implementation and frankly has no bearing on Dolby Vision (yes, if you look at scopes swapping between the two there are differences, but our algorithm/analysis is not impacted by the choice the user makes here).

Apologies if I made this choice sound more important /dire than intended. If you look at images or test patterns and toggle between these two settings, you’ll see the differences but again, our algorithm is not inhibited at all by this. We’d prefer colorists to have the freedom to work in whatever manner makes them the most comfortable here.

Hope that helps!”