I just got the new copy of Videomaker magazine, and saw a comparison of DVD creation programs. What peaked my interest, was that some of them offer Dolby 5.1 surround encoding. Affordable for even me!

Which brings me to my question- Who is actually doing 5.1 surround, and how is it accomplished? I realise that you would probably need to have multiple mic placement, and seperate channels. How do you take this, and transform it into the 3D enviroment that I love so much?
Thanks

Usually audio is recorded in mono or stereo (whereby in an orchestra
each instrument is recorded seperately) and then mixed together
in a 3D space.

What they tend to do on movies is get some ambient sound from
a location and mix that in most or all of the channels and then
have dialogue on the center and/or left/right speakers. Music
can be mixed in any of the channels depending on the wishes
etc.

Surround is a lot "less" surround (or less realistic) then you think
it is. Things like bullets flying by or planes flying over you are
done in a very simple way. They just record or create the sound
and then are moved across the 3D sound field with surround
editing programs.

Some orchestral recording are being done in real 3D, but I
haven't heard a lot about these myself...

That's the kind of stuff I wanted to know. What kind of 3D audio programs?

check out Vegas Video 4. It is the first NLE app to have 5.1 audio editing as far as I have seen.

Rob:D

I think most professionals use Pro Tools (there is also a free
version of this available, but I don't know whether this supports
surround mixing). Robert gave an excellent suggestion, the
new Vegas 4 (you can download a demo from www.sonicfoundry.com)
Editor has support for it as well.

Most more serious audio applications support surround mixing
I think. I can ask an audio friend of mine which applications he
is using for this if you'd like.

I took a one-day seminar on DVD creation for profit during which Mac and PC solutions were demo'd. The Apple authoring tool of choice, DVD Studio Pro, had a great solution for 5.1, calling up an illustration of a surround-sound 6-speaker system on which you could drag and drop audio files. The pc-based DVD Maestro (also Apple-owned) didn't have the feature (but does of course support AC-3) and if other lower end software does I'm not aware of it.

I'm using Vegas 4 for my surround sound recording. Where I don't have individual mono tracks for each of the surround channels, I downmix a surround mono channel by using an equalizer to "remove" all audio frequencies but the one I want to pass to the surround channel. Gives a result that makes the listener/viewer feel right in the midst of the music.

Another high end editing application with 5.1 surround is Incite Editor 3.0 with a Merging audio Board.

www.inciteonline.com

Just thought I'll add my 2£,

All the best,

Ed Smith

Ed, I have seen Incite before, and it looks wonderful. But... Is there an alternative to Incite's $3,100 price? Or, 1,984 BP, as you would say? Sorry, my keyboard doesnt have the L with the squiggles :)

Instead of another NLE system, and having to learn to edit their way, is there a simple and cheap plug-in to create an imersive audio environ?

What NLE are you using, I think there are some surround plug-ins for most packages. But I don't know where to find them.

About 6 months ago there was anarticle about creating a surround mix using Premiere. Ummmm, now where is it.

Ed Smith

what type of file does Dolby Digital 5.1 create? Is this file just imported into any DVD authoring program that can hadle Dolby 5.1?? What about DTS? How do u make that, and what apps can do it??

Dolby Digital is usually AC-3 from what I understand. You should be able to just import that file into the dvd program. I dont know any of the specifics but Im sure some others can help. I haven't heard of DTS being created within any apps as of yet.


Rob:D

DTS is still a fairly uncommon audio format and not supported by most audio apps. Stick with AC3, for now.

Ed- I use Premiere primarily, occasionaly using Storm. I haven't moved into creating DVDs yet, but will probably make that move before too long. Is any of this audio tech available for VHS as well as DVD?
Thanks

I create 5.1 discrete and also Dolby Digital EX soundtracks on my Mac. I do most of the audio mixing within Final Cut Pro. I usually allocate 4 or more tracks per channel, usually just two for the subwoofer, though. The center channel is where I keep most of the dialog. Left and right are used for music and sound effects as are the left and right surrounds. The subwoofer is used to give power to rumbling thunder, gunshots, explosions, whatever. I export each channel combined (all the center channel tracks combined into one, etc etc etc) out as single mono 48khz 16-bit AIFF files. Obviously I have 6 sound files here, each the length of the video program I am editing. I can then use Dolby A.Pack (which only works on Mac OS 9, the OS X version is extremely buggy) to drag and drop the audio files on the channel which they represent. Then I make some settings and encode a single AC3 file. I then burn the video and audio onto a DVD-RW and listen to it in my "home theater" which has properly calibrated levels and make adjustments in the audio levels in Final Cut Pro as necessary.

I have had extrememly good results.

So is it fair to say that protools is definitely the app of choice to do all your 5.1 encoding???

Keith:

Most of the audio technology here is not relevant for VHS since the VHS format only supports 2 discrete channels of sound. Using Dolby Pro Logic you can encode four channels into those. You get right, left, center and mono surround.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 (previously called AC3) discussed here will not fit on VHS, but is widely used on DVD

DTS is used in many theaters and is generally considered to be slightly superior to DD 5.1. It uses less compression and thus carries a higher bitrate.

Some DVD players and audio systems support DTS, but definately not all. All DVD players support Dolby Digital (required by the standard) so that will usually be a safe bet. Even if the player does not have a 6 channel sound system behind it, the player can "downmix" the 6 channels into 2.

Hans Henrik

Umm dts does have a higher bit rate, but that does not make it less compressed, it would be more correct to say, it is compressed in a different way which yields slightly better results.

Always remember the rules of the game too, to properly hear the differences you need to spend a real lot of money, the average system barely has 5.1 let alone expensive enough to really expose the differences between dts and DD.

zac

Good point Kermie.

I was just thinking of the issue that DTS usually runs at 1509 kbit/s while Dolby Digital runs at 448 kbit/s, but since the compression algorithms are different it is a bit of "comparing apples to banans".

In fact I just found an interesting test of DTS vs. Dolby Digital where DD actually comes out on top. They also conclude that many other issues are at least as important than the core audio encoding technology.

Read it here:

http://www.dvdfile.com/news/special_report/features/dolby_vs_dts/dolby.html

Hans Henrik

90% of dts releases these days are at 768kb/s not 1509, this is due to space considerations on DVDs in regards to extra's and length of movie.

So the difference has become even less apparent.

Zac

yes, but Dolby Digital is less than 768 kbps. So in that case, it
is less compressed as well (and uses a different compression).
Dolby generally uses 348 kbps streams!

I've seen Surcode DTS around a lot. But as someone else stated,
DD is the standard. I'd stick to that (cost wise as well!!) and
if you truly want DTS have it as an EXTRA track (there are few
"hollywood" movies out with ONLY a dts track. If this is the case
they usually have two versions of the movie, one with DD only and
one with DTS only).

I think the only program supporting DTS is Scenarist at this
moment.

A seperate Dolby Digital encoder is SoftEncode (forgot who
makes this). I think Vegas Video is the cheapest way to do
true surround Dolby Digital encoding!