Movie companies come up with specification of HDR standard for cinema screen

Digital Cinema Initiative, a joint venture of 20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros, has released a design specification for an HDR standard specifically for cinema screens.

The Digital Cinema Initiative started this summer to work out a proposal for the specifications for an HDR standard for cinemas. It doesn’t exist for the time being, but the film companies want to change that. The specification assumes a color display of 12-bit, a minimum black value of maximum 0.005 cd/m² and a brightness of 500 cd/m².

The parameters described in the design specification are mainly intended for large LED screens, which means that a projector is no longer used. These ‘direct view displays’ described by the joint venture are intended to improve image quality through increased peak brightness and a wider dynamic range.

In addition to an HDR standard, the Digital Cinema Initiative is also working on requirements for regular and new LED cinema screens to enable high frame rates. This concerns a maximum of 120 frames per second for movies at a 2k resolution in 2d.

It is unknown when the specifications will be finalized and when they will actually be widely applied. This will take some time, as LED screens in cinemas are still relatively new and require quite high investments.

The film companies probably want to prevent the qualitative gap between the home situation and the cinema, in terms of video quality, from becoming too large. Television manufacturers have been releasing televisions with HDR support for years, including enlarged color spaces and a high maximum brightness. For example, OLED TVs have perfect black levels. From next year, televisions will also have the option of displaying 4k images with 120 images per second with HDMI 2.1.