For The Best Theatrical Result, Do The Dolby Vision First

The following excerpt is from S6 E5 of The T Stop Inn with guest Michael Cioni and host Ben Allan, ACS on 21 March 2025. We highly recommend listening to the entire show.

Michael Cioni: I used to own a post house called Light Iron, and we did everything from The Social Network, we worked on Spider-Man and Pirates of the Caribbean and Flight and a lot of projects. And what we used to see happen is, these major ASC members – I’m a member of the American Society of Cinematographers – but these major cinematographers would come in. And as we saw this transition to streaming and HDR, they would, some of them would lean into that, and some of them would resist it. And the way they would resist it, when we would get to the color correction, is they would say, we’re going to color for theatrical first. That was the phrase they would use, theatrical first. And they go, my primary objective of making this the hero is theatrical first.

Now, actually, I respected that approach. And some of them, I could understand that making the theatrical first simply was them being comfortable with what was truth, right? This is what it should look like. And then they knew that it could be scaled down. But the cinematographers that said, let’s do the Dolby Vision first, they actually end up – and people could disagree with me, but I have put so many hours into this process with so many different people in a dark room with monitors and projectors all calibrated – you actually get a better result on your theatrical if you do a Dolby Vision first. Because Dolby Vision gives you the ability to see truly everything which the DLP cannot deliver. It can’t produce the resolution and the color and the contrast and the dynamic range that exists inside of your original camera negative, which is displayed on a Dolby Vision display.

And so when you corrected for Dolby Vision on a primary display, not only was that almost perfectly emulated in the home theater experience, your theatrical experience benefited from it.

Ben Allan: Because you’re seeing potential in the footage that you wouldn’t see otherwise. Yeah, and so I guess that’s kind of not just a practical shift in thinking, but there’s an emotional element to that, I think, for a lot of people as well. That the idea that cinema is the ultimate and therefore that’s what we should be doing first. That’s what we should be prioritizing. There’s a deep emotional connection to that idea.