It’s so funny that I actually vaguely remember hearing about this back in 2011.
Even if this was indeed a thing, it’s nowhere near as advanced as how dolby vision or even just regular hdr10 works.
This reminds me more of the “filmmaker mode” they finally started building into new tv sets just within the last several years, which completely turns off any processing like sharpening, noise reduction, etc, and also sets the correct 6500k color temperature (or as close as the tv can get to it out of the box).
Maybe that’s basically what this THX Media Director was, simply forcing the tv into a thx mode over the hdmi connection from the bd player if the disc and player were both capable, but … you should really just have that input set to that mode all the time so that whatever you’re watching on blu-ray is relatively accurate to the industry standards it would’ve been color graded and mastered at.
It’s possible that the difference with THX’s Media Director is that they actually took it a step further and tweaked the settings on a title by title basis … but again, that’s not really how things are supposed to work. Lucas, for example, isn’t supposed to grade and master his films expecting everyone’s televisions to be slightly tweaked one way to his specific set of preferences while Spielberg grades his films to another.
Maybe this really was an experiment in what eventually became hdr, and thx’s media director was able to somehow subtly tweak the settings this way and that as the movie played? Very interesting.
True story, I watched the 2011 disc of ANH on a 2k cinema projector in an actual movie theater back in 2017 and it looked surprisingly good. Like, maybe/probably that was just the insane quality of the projector making up for any shortcomings of the old 2004 hd master, but I could finally see where the bold statement all the way back then of it being a “digital negative” came from.
THX always sought to ensure that the colorimetry of their films adhered to the director’s vision, first the thing started with the alterations in the LaserDisc masters of 93, so I would not be surprised if George financed this technology so that interested film directors decided to hire it so that the Blu-Ray editions had the desired colorimetry, and then so that everyone could see the same thing on their TV the technology would calibrate the TV according to the title, but it was quickly forgotten and ignored, I discovered all this thanks to that user a few months ago, I hope I can contact him so he can show me examples of how this technology worked in the Star Wars saga