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Topic: Dolby Cinema

Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 12-22-2014 04:15 AM

I’ve tried to shoot some pictures, but a cellphone camera just couldn’t handle it. To quote Zaphod Beeblebrox: "It's the weird colour scheme that freaks me. Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls, which are labeled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to let you know you've done it."

This essentially describes the whole layout of the room. Everything, except the screen, is black.

The "immersive tunnel" at the beginning is essentially a long, dark tunnel with indirect blue lightning all the way to the auditorium. It starts with about 15ft of slightly curved screen. This screen is a short throw projection affair. Four standard "office" LED DLP short throw projectors stitched together via edge blending and concealed in the ceiling. The whole thing runs a short loop based on the current movie and some generic Dolby content featuring some animated fanciness. After the projection, you get some "movie related multi-channel sounds" on a loop from some concealed speakers. Then you continue your journey to the auditorium itself. The space under the raisers of the auditorium has essentially been used to create this tunnel. There is a whole concept behind this tunnel and its design with curves and bends: You exit the busy lobby, the noises of the lobby slowly die away, while you enter the realm of the movie... The whole thing feels more like a theme park attraction than a movie theater. It remains to be seen how much of this effect gets still trough on a busy night.

The room is just sparsely lit. Besides the blue glow around the screen and the blue halo along the aisles, there's just the legally minimum of required light coming from lights in the ceiling. There’s also no other aisle lightning, so no shiny LED strips radiating their red, green or blueness at the screen. Emergency lightning also has been sufficiently masked to not interfere with the screen.

Something that will probably evade most casual visitors is that the walls of the auditorium, because it's so dark, are indeed all paneled and angled, much like a stealth fighter. It will take your eyes a few minutes to see just parts of it.
The seats are comfortable fake leather seats with headrests, but unfortunately with hard plastic arm rests. Also, those are not double armrests like in the concept pictures. The best part is the extreme legroom. Most people will be able to stretch their legs to full extent with still some room to spare. I'm unable to reach the seat in front of me and I do have rather long legs.
There are 64 speakers and 5 subwoofers in the room, none of them visible to the naked eye. They're indeed all concealed behind either the screen or the side panels. The Dolby Atmos system in this room sounds great, the acoustics in the room surely help. It's not the best I've heard, but we're entering the realm of "What does it matter? It's more than good enough." here. One of the most positive side effects of the acoustic treatments of the room: During the silent moments of a movie, it's totally silent. No audible noises leaking in from the lobby, the adjacent rooms, projection booth or air conditioning.

One of the biggest letdowns is the screen itself. It's a plain white screen, which is obviously an advantage over a silver screen. But like with almost all those new, premium concepts, there’s no masking whatsoever. Since the rest of the room is essentially black, if the content fits the screen exactly, this is no real distraction. Unfortunately, the screen is one of the common width type of screens, which in my opinion, is a missed chance to diversify from most of those other "PLF" concepts that use "flat screens".

The image is created by two Christie 6P laser projectors in a dual-mirror Christie Duo configuration. With their external laser light sources, fed via fiber and no need to fit a multi-kilowatt xenon bulb in their belly, they look rather nimble for what you would otherwise expect to find in such a big room.

One of the few barely usable pictures I managed to create is the one of the 3D glasses, using a bag of crisps as contrast. As you can see, those are not the standard Dolby 3D glasses, their glasses are bigger.

I've tried my own (far superior) Infitec 3D glasses with this system, unfortunately, they're not compatible with the 6P laser system. Seemingly, the color primaries differ from the standard Dolby 3D deployment.

The provided 3D glasses, although larger than the standard glasses, aren't the best unfortunately. Many of them suffer from color defects in the extreme left and right (left being green and right being red) and also have this distracting white glare around the corners, comparable to what you'll predominantly find in the barely usable plastic version. Dolby really needs to fix this, which seems to be possible, because those über-expensive Infitec glasses don’t have those defects and at the given ticket price, you might expect flawless glasses. The interesting part is that one pair of glasses are better than the others.
If you have seen laser before, you might know what to expect. Laser projection for normal 2D DCI content looks very much like a regular, Xenon projected image. The difference is noticeable only in content that actually uses the broader color gamut and besides a few short demos and snipes, there's no content in "Dolby Vision" just yet. The few trailers there are, make those 2K Dolby Atmos trailers look stupid. So, this HDR content looks great, but more like computer graphics on steroids, not really cinematic. For normal, recorded content, it looks a lot more like "being there", which will also not really improve the cinematic looks. A lot like HFR, the whole HDR process will have a steep learning curve and also will take time to get accepted by movie buffs, I'm not yet sure if I actually want this to seep through to feature films in general.

For 3D, this system is a whole different matter though. The difference is almost night and day. It delivers 3D images at about the same brightness you'd expect from a good 2D show. This really is a game changer for 3D. Besides the problems with the glasses, Dolby 3D delivers this enhanced brightness without any crosstalk whatsoever, not even in the subtitling, which is traditionally hard to do. All in all, this is remarkable, given the brightness of the two combined pictures.
So, now for this black thing, which is also supposed to be an important part of “Dolby Vision”. Let me first start by saying: No, black still is not black, unfortunately. Also, the unavoidable letterboxing on an unmasked screen for anything but "flat" also doesn't help. But, the black on black with black buttons and handles design of the room helps. Also, the greater contrast due to more brightness also adds in obviously. The black is probably one of the best blacks I've seen using DLP projectors up until now and comparable to what would be achievable using 35mm.

The Netherlands is one of the few markets in mainland Europe that has, given the population density, some credible Digital IMAX presence. As a matter of fact, there is a Digital IMAX screen just a few yards away. Both concepts are similarly priced and if you compare both concepts, Dolby Cinema wins hands down. The picture is about equally big, but in 4K, which even helps for 2K content, because there's practically no more visible pixel grid on those oversized screens. The dual laser projector outperforms the dual 2K IMAX xenon projection in every aspect regarding brightness, the room is acoustically better, the sound systems outshines it in both raw power, clarity and detail. Also, although not entirely due to IMAX alone, the seats in this auditorium are far better as is the legroom, which will be greatly appreciated by all visitors.