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Dolby selects Christie
December 03, 2014
Cypress, Calif., and San Fransico— Christie® and Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE: DLB) are pleased to announce that Christie will co-develop, supply, install, and service proprietary Dolby Vision™ projection systems for Dolby Cinema™, a branded premium cinema offering for exhibitors and moviegoers that delivers the total cinema experience. Christie’s projection technologies will ensure that Dolby Cinema combines a spectacular image with immersive sound and inspired design, to make every visit a completely captivating cinematic event.
Dolby Cinema will feature the Dolby Vision projection system, which uses state-of-the-art optics and image processing to deliver high dynamic range (HDR) with enhanced color technology that has been praised by filmmakers for its amazing contrast, high brightness, and color range that more closely matches what the human eye can see. This new proprietary HDR technology with enhanced color uses two newly designed high-frame-rate (HFR) capable Christie 4K laser projection heads that feature a highly customized and unique light path. Combined with Christie’s 6P modular laser light sources, this technology delivers high-contrast images and ultra-brightness, which define the visual excellence of Dolby Cinema.
Unique to the Dolby Vision projection system, beyond its astonishing brightness and vivid color reproduction, is its ability to deliver HDR with an incomparable contrast ratio that exceeds any other image technology currently on the market. The result is a richer, more detailed viewing experience, with strikingly vivid and realistic images that make viewers feel like they are in the movie’s world. Dolby Vision content will be available in 2015, coinciding with the deployment of the first Dolby Vision projection systems in Dolby Cinema locations.
The newly constructed JT Eindhoven cineplex in the Netherlands, opening in December 2014, will be among the first Dolby Cinema locations to install a Dolby Vision projector. The Dolby Cinema will also deliver to audiences the best in immersive audio, with a potent combination of Dolby Atmos® sound and Christie Vive™ audio speakers and Class D amplifiers, many of which were specially designed for this demanding application. Dolby Atmos moves audio around the cinema, even overhead, with amazing richness and depth. The lifelike sounds of music, people, and things flow all around the cinema in sync with the action to create a more immersive and moving experience.
“Dolby Cinema lets studios and exhibitors focus on what they do best, with the confidence that Dolby will deliver a premium experience that makes the most of the latest cinema technologies,” said Doug Darrow, Senior Vice President, Cinema, Dolby Laboratories. “To get this right, we naturally went to a leader in projection that could help deliver a breakthrough solution, and I’m pleased that we were able to work with Christie to co-develop the Dolby Vision projection system. With this announcement, we are confident that exhibitors and studios will now have the ultimate venue to present movies that will keep audiences coming back for more.”
“Cinema projection does not get any better than this,” said Don Shaw, Senior Director, Product Management, Christie. “We have combined the research and engineering resources of two of the most innovative companies in the world to create the best projection system that anyone has yet seen. We’ll be delivering audiences a richer, more detailed viewing experience with up to 14 foot lamberts onscreen in 3D and up to 31 foot lamberts for 2D Dolby Vision content, far exceeding any ‘ultra-bright’ industry standards, to all Dolby Cinema locations.”
Additional Background on Industry Leaders’ Cooperation
The announcement follows several years of joint development work by Dolby and Christie on the Dolby Vision projection system, including testing the technologies involved at cinemas in California and Europe.
As Dolby announced today, Dolby Cinema is a branded premium cinema offering for exhibitors and moviegoers. Dolby Cinema locations, installed in collaboration with exhibitor partners around the globe, will be equipped with spectacular image and sound technologies combined with inspired design.
About Dolby Cinema
Dolby Cinema delivers the total cinema experience. It combines powerful image and sound technologies with inspired cinema design to make every visit a completely captivating cinematic event.
Dolby Cinema will include Dolby Vision—a state-of-the-art authoring and playback imaging technology that enables the cinema to bring the story alive onscreen. Outfitted with Dolby Atmos, a Dolby Cinema transports audiences into the movie with breathtakingly real sound that fills the cinema and flows all around them.
When these technologies are combined with the sophisticated Dolby Cinema design, everything comes together to pull moviegoers more deeply into the story and transform their visit into an event. For more information, please visit the Dolby Cinema web page.
About Dolby Vision
Dolby Vision delivers a dramatically different visual experience—astonishing brightness, incomparable contrast, and captivating color—that brings entertainment to life.
Even though most movies are captured and recorded using technology that produces the colors and brightness of real life, much of that richness is lost by the time moviegoers get to watch. That’s because current cinema color-grading standards are based on the limitations of the current projection technologies and require that the content be altered to match their display performance—dramatically reducing the range of colors, brightness, and contrast.
Dolby Vision changes that, giving creative teams the freedom to use the full gamut of colors, peak highlights, greater brightness, and amazing contrast, with the confidence that those will be reproduced faithfully on cinema screens that feature Dolby Vision.
About Dolby Atmos
Introduced in April 2012, Dolby Atmos has been embraced by all the major Hollywood studios, 11 Academy Award® winning directors, and 23 Academy Award winning sound mixers, among others. More than 800 Dolby Atmos screens have been installed or committed to in more than 40 countries with more than 250 exhibitor partners. More than 200 films from 17 different countries have been or are scheduled to be released with Dolby Atmos sound since the first film debuted in June 2012.
Dolby Atmos has received technical achievement awards from both the Hollywood Post Alliance and the Cinema Audio Society. As the inventors of the only object-based audio format used in the cinema today, Dolby is working closely with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in driving adoption of standards for object-based audio.
For the latest list of Dolby Atmos titles, visit dolby.com/atmosmovies. To learn more about Dolby Atmos, visit dolby.com/Atmos.