I know it's been asked.. but about that 5.1 again

[Tim Joy]

Did a search and found some answers but those were a little old, maybe things have changed...

I'm considering mixing my 25 min short in surround. In Logic Pro 9.
It will be screening off bluray in a big theater (almost 300 seats), and it's a lot of suspense/ horror with great live music and lot's of crazy swirling sound fx, thunder..etc.
I've mixed music in surround for many years, and mixed tons of shorts and things in stereo so it's not like I'm a noob at all. Been in audio for many years.
I have a nice, and calibrated, home surround monitoring system with 824's as my LCR. And i have access to a big theater to check the mix.

I did some tests,- encoded the 5.1 from logic in compressor, burned with DVDSP and it would not recognize it as dolby digital audio on my receiver. Only pro logic. ?? That's one hurdle.

My main reason for wanting to do a surround mix is that I want the dialog coming from the C speaker, and I want to add a little life to the surrounds to envelop the audience a bit. Nothing crazy.

Any experience and advice greatly appreciated.

 

[drapeama]

Any way you could export in other format, like uncompressed, and "remux" with an external encoder? I know it's possible on PC (with free tools) but on Mac..
That way you could try to export/encode/import and see if that works.

 

[Tim Joy]

Yes I have individual WAV files.

 

[drapeama]

Yes I have individual WAV files.

As I said, on PC you can use external software to encode to Dolby Digital, and they're all free to download, but mainly available on PC.
If you know someone (or if you personally own a PC) you could put these .wavs on an external HDD and encode them as .ac3 on your PC. Dolby audio would work the same even if not created on a Mac, audio remains audio. So it should work.
That's the best thing I could suggest for now.

Edit: (to add to this) it doesn't take a very powerfull computer to encode the .ac3 file. A laptop could easily do the job.

 

[Tim Joy]

I can run windows on my mac so it's not a big issue to encode the files. I think I can figure that part out eventually.

Looking for more advice about mixing in surround for a big theater VS stereo. Still waiting to hear back from the projectionist whether it will even be hooked up to their surround system. So it might be a moot point. Starting to think I should just wait on the surround mix. I've already got half done in ST.

 

[Noiz2]

I'm one who will 99% of the time recommend that low budget films not be mixed in surround. BUT you have the set up and experience so on that front I would say go for it. Plus you are doing for the right reasons.

The playback may be an issue. I'm assuming your not showing the film off of a DVD so how are you going to deliver the sound?

I think you can fix your DVD surround issue by authoring the DVD in DVD Studio Pro. You have to have the track properly flagged so your decoder knows it's a DD file it should play.

Back to the Theatre.

The DD for the big screen is I believe the same data as the little screen DD, but you probably have no way to feed your stream into their decoder.

You can with the right plugin create a ProLogic matrixed stereo surround mix. That will also get you what you want but you have to really check the decode because those "swirling" sounds can freak out the decoder. And if you do that you either need do also Dolby SR encode the mix or personally make sure they flip out the SR decode switch. If not your track will sound incredibly awful.

The good news down the road is that by 2013 pretty much all of the theatres in the US will have digital playback. And that should be enough of a market to get those authoring tools out to indi filmmakers. At that point creating a surround mix for a theatre showing should be very straight forward. Unfortunately that is not now.

 

[Tim Joy]

Thanks,
I'll be showing it off Bluray. They say they have a 5.1 system that they use when they stream the MET opera, which I think is the same standard DD 5.1 as on a DVD. No?
I did my test authoring with DVDSP and it didn't show up on the receiver as DD, and it didn't sound quite right either.
I used the "add surround" button in Compressor, made the .ac3 file and used that in DVDSP.

I won't be doing any swirling panning, it will be built into the st. FX and then just fed a little to the surrounds.

I think I'm going to get my stereo mix finished first, and then if there's time, (must deliver on wed!) do a simple surround mix from that. Then I can put both audio streams on the disc so we can choose either one, depending on the venue.

 

[ullanta]

What are you feeding INTO compressor? ThAt is, what's the source material? What surround format are you choosing in compressor? Is compressor recognizing and properly assigning your channels?

 

[Tim Joy]

OOOPS. My bad.

Didn't have the DVD player set right.. It's WORKING correctly now. Sounds awesome.

Now a little undecided whether I should go for the surround mix first, or continue on my St. mix. I can test this one at the theater soon, so that might help me decide.

 

[Noiz2]

...
I won't be doing any swirling panning, it will be built into the st. FX and then just fed a little to the surrounds.
...

It's kind of beside the point since you can play a desecrate 5.1 but FYI when the matrixed track gets made it uses phase differences to encode a 4.0 mix to 2.0 (also referred to as LtRt). So things that change phase in the mix can get miss directed when the 2.0 is decoded to 4.0 (plus phantom center and filtered sub). It classically happens with music that has phaser FX applied. Things will just jump to a surround or from the the surround to the front.

 

[drapeama]

I'll be showing it off Bluray.

Ask if you could playback lossless audio off your bluray disc (otherwise it'll playback as ProLogic) and export as PCM instead. Having the choice, I'd go with a PCM, unless disc space is an issue.