The other day, Maxine Gervais sat down with Cullen Kelly to discuss her work.
My client sees the SDR version first
“I’m embracing Dolby, definitely, but in a reverse engineering way; and I think by doing so, it has made my clients embrace HDR way more. And I can give you a hint to my workflow: I do not grade in HDR. I do grade HDR, but when I do my session with my clients, it’s in SDR, and then I reveal the HDR.”
Future-proofing
“Basically, I have different LUTs for my HDR, so I can constrain it – not constrain it – but I can round it at 600 [nits] or round it at 1,000 [nits], or I can go a little bit above 1,000, so if you have a 4,000 nits delivery, arguing that maybe in the future we can use a lot of light and very little energy, if some studio asks for 4,000 [nits], I can round it a little higher than 1,000 nits for that as well. However, if I have a movie, that although we’re doing a projection version, but the primary delivery, or what’s going to be most important – like maybe it’ll be in the theater for 2 weeks, but then it’s gonna live forever i[n a home cinema version] – I might grade the projected version into [the] Dolby Universe.”
SDR is still the master
“Sometimes you grade in HDR for your clients and then you give them this beautiful thing, and you’re like, ‘I can only do so much with the SDR; we’re using the Dolby sliders and this and that, and they’re interlinked, so we might [have to] compromise the SDR’, and you could pitch it as, ‘Well, you know, because the SDR, eventually, nobody will see that anyway’, right? Well, I mean that’s a ‘rich’ concept. Because Europe is mostly SDR; the rest of the world is mostly SDR; and I care about everybody; I want people in India seeing my movie the same way: so to me, SDR is still the master.”
I don’t want to be handcuffed
“I don’t want to be handcuffed. I don’t want Dolby to dictate how I’m gonna work. And I don’t want Dolby to develop a grading tool within the grading tool: that becomes counterintuitive.”
The Daejeon Chronicles 
Leave a Reply