During a podcast recorded five years ago, Shane Mario Ruggieri, Advanced Imaging Systems Creative Lead, Dolby Laboratories, was asked what kinds of cameras work best for HDR:
What cameras do you normally come across when you’re working in HDR? Is there any specific camera that’s worked really well for you? Are there cameras that are problematic?
“I remember something that Bill B., the guy who put me in the business, he told me something when I asked him what camera I should buy and he looked at me and he goes, ‘If you’re thinking about the camera, you’re not thinking about the story. Start with the story and that’ll tell you what camera you need.’ If you think about it and apply his advice to HDR, what’s most important is the story. And by arranging the scenes to kind of work into a dynamic range arc and then that arc has to maximize the audience reactions and If you’re doing that, you’re telling the story better. And so once you’ve established the arc of the story, and you’ve kind of worked out the kind of reactions that you’re after, how many stops do you need to get those reactions is the question.” – Shane Mario Ruggieri, CSI (02/16/2018, Colorist Podcast, Ep.21)
What exactly might that arrangement of scenes to work into a dynamic range arc look like in practice? We now have an illustration of just such a graph from a research paper published by Dolby last year.
The thin solid line in Fig. 14 represents the director’s creative intent by mapping their desired emotional/narrative viewer states, such as arousal, over the duration of the entire movie. The horizontal axis is the movie timeline. The vertical axis indicates the viewer’s emotional and narrative state (E&N), in this case, the emotional state of arousal, represented by a thick black line, over the duration of the entire movie. At some points, the viewer may be expected to be less excited, at other intervals the viewer may be expected to be more engaged. The time point corresponding to circle 3 in Fig. 14 illustrates an instance of over-responsiveness as compared with the viewer’s expected state, other points on the timeline represent under-stimulation. The dotted lines represent the adjustments necessary to align the viewer’s responses to the director’s desired viewer states.
When it comes to content graded to SDR levels, the role luminance plays in arousing various emotional states is severely limited, just as is highly compressed audio when it comes to being able to convey the emotional impact and energy needed in dramatic moments. Wim Wenders once told Variety, “You could just as well be brain dead in some movies, because the amount of brain activity is minimal. In 3D, however, your whole brain is aflame.” We feel exactly the same way about SDR, and no monitoring with physiological assessment technology is necessary to figure that out! Pages 2-5 of the paper contain some interesting observations concerning creative intent and technological capability.
Biosensors For Landing Creative Intent. Scott Daly, Evan Gitterman, Dan Darcy, and Shane Ruggieri, Dolby Labs, Inc., San Francisco, USA. 2023 Society for Imaging Science and Technology
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