First movies in Dolby Vision coming this year

12 Jan 2015 | Rasmus Larsen |

We first heard about Dolby Vision at last year's CES, but something will finally happen in 2015. Dolby is building movie theatres but is also planning on offering the Dolby Vision experience in the living room. The first movies to be available in the format will be The Lego Movie, Edge of Tomorrow, and Into the Storm.

Everything is awesome in HDR

Everyone talked about HDR (high dynamic range) at this year's CES, and although Dolby prefers to call it Dolby Vision, it is one of the two HDR technologies that industry players must consider. The other standard is the one from UHD Alliance. The difference? Much higher brightness levels in Dolby Vision, but it is also more expensive to implement.

HDR stands for "high dynamic range" and means that a movie or TV series will be graded to go into much deeper blacks and far brighter whites. Today, most TVs have a peak brightness of around 200-400 cd/m2, but with Dolby Vision we are entering 4000 cd/m2 territory in specific areas of the image, such as a sun. It is a significant leap in picture quality when done right, but you will need a new TV. These will be available later in 2015.

Movies have not been made in HDR in the past, simply because movie theatres and living room TVs have not been able to reproduce it. However, that will change with Dolby Vision, which is an end-to-end solution from the camera and studio to playback on screen. Dolby needs Hollywood on board for this, and at CES the company announced that Warner Brothers is currently working on Dolby Vision HDR versions of The Lego Movie, Edge of Tomorrow, and Into the Storm.

- "The future of imaging and television is full of amazing possibilities, and we're eager to expand our partnership with Dolby to deliver a steady pipeline of Dolby Vision titles, starting with Edge of Tomorrow, Into the Storm, and The Lego Movie, to consumers in 2015," said Jim Wuthrich, President, Americas, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.

Learn more about Dolby Vision here.

The three movies will be released in Dolby Vision in the first quarter of 2015. No details were provided, but we are guessing that they will be available in Dolby Vision theatres. Netflix also confirmed to FlatpanelsHD that they will support Dolby Vision and the other HDR standard when they launch 4K HDR streaming later in 2015. Everything is Awesome!