Thanks Martin!!

I'll download VLC and see what happens!

Chris!

Martin! You've made my day! VLC works a treat! Thank you!!!

so if you don't care about "techincally" correct, here is how I have recorded 5.1

now to be specific, I was recording construction equipment at work, and was looking for a fat wide sound. to do this, I set up 5 mics rather far appart. the FR and FL where set on a bracket I made to hold 3 mics. I used 3 shotguns because thats what I could get. center pointed at machine, the FR and FL pointed at 45 deg from center. the rears where 5 to 10 feet behind the fronts and pointed away. now you may be saying according to everything you've ever _read_ thats crazy wrong. nope. what that did was create significant time delay, which was good. in mixing, the rears had a much wider sound than if I had followed the book of how to do 5.1. I got a very wide fat dynamic sound which worked great for the video of construction equipment doing its thing. it was a big bold soundtrack.

I used a MOTU 896HD connnected to a G4 laptop and used FCP to record 6 channels at once. worked extremly well.

now if you want to record a symphony, maybe you need to follow the book.

for most dialog recording I'd use the conventional overhead

Thanks for your post Steve!

Actually, believe it or not, the original set-up we used (5 x Rode Shotguns) sounded pretty good! Sure it may not be technically accurate, however, as we were only recording atmos, this technique seemed to work really well. It sounded absolutely fantastic when birds flew overheard, and when trucks drove past. Once viewed on the big screen in surround, it sounded "real". It didn't sound like it was put together in a studio (unlike some big budget commercial films). As you guys have discussed, the Beta 52 was pretty much useless, however, it did record some great low truck sounds. The only problem was all the shotguns peaked - so only the 52 track was useful. This worked out great, as we just used that section in other parts. The firewire synced V1P's worked fine. We re-synced them before each take, and they didn't loose any frames.

We also tried a PG81 set-up as suggested. This worked well, but didn't sound as good as the shotguns. However, we used a DEVA II for this set-up which was a LOT nicer!

In post production, was actually decided to mix directly in Final Cut Pro. Now I know a lot of people are going to moan and say that's the worst way to do it, but for us it worked really well! If we needed more control (i.e. easier pans around all speakers) we made the sound in Soundtrack Pro and exported as a 5.1 Quicktime file - then imported back in FCP. This system worked really well...

Again, thanks everyone for there help!

Chris!