5.1 audio

[Tom Sessions]

OK people, I'm a moron and want to produce a DVD with 5.1 surround sound for wedding ceremonies and reception highlight reels. I use Adobe pp1.5 and Encore for authoring.

I have been using the default settings for capturing and rendering my timelines and sending them over to Encore for the DVD burn.

My home theater system...Marantz sr-18 has been in the shop for the last year, so I don't know if anything I have done is comming out in surround sound in the prologic mode at the client's home. I'm too afraid to ask.

My question is...how does one set up Adobe to reproduce 5.1 on a DVD or is this done in PPro before importing it to Encore?

Treat me like the idiot I am, and draw me a picture...just be gentle.

[Steve House]

I'll leave it to better experts than I for specific info about Adobe but you say your HT receiver has been in the shop for a YEAR?!?!?!?!? Why?! for cryin' out loud, how could you tolerate that?

[Tom Sessions]

Every time I get the damn thing back, something new is wrong with it. I will not let them win this battle. They think I will just give up...but they are way wrong.

[Mark Willey]

Tom,

Sorry about your shop ridden gear. Hope it comes back soon.

Recording surround takes a lot of specialized equipment and experience, not to mention time to set up the microphones. I guess I'm not exactly clear about what the purpose of using surround would be for a live event like a wedding ceremony or reception. What would you like the viewer to hear coming out of the rear speakers and out of the LF channel? One of the many challenges with shooting a live event using surround is that the focus of the sound needs to change with the perspective of the camera. For example, let's say you're shooting a wedding in a large church. There's a pipe organ at the back of the church and the ceremony is happening at the front altar. Let's say you're shooting the bride as she walks down the isle, from the front side of the church, so you're looking back up the isle at the pipe organ. The sound of the organ would need to be mixed so that it was coming from the front left, right and center channels. Then, as the bride passes your camera position and you pan to follow her, the sound would need to shift first to the right or left and then to the rear channels as you aimed your camera at the altar. That would be a lot of work for minimal (in this case) benefit. If you were working alone, you would need to build some kind of a helmet with a surround array of shotgun microphones pointed in five directions. At that point, I think you'd attract more attention than the bride. :) Plus you'd need a dedicated recorder with at least 5 channels and a proper surround mixing facility to make it sound good.

My advice would be to skip surround and just focus on getting great sound for the front speakers.

Perhaps I've misread your intentions however. What were you thinking you would like to have coming out of the rear and LF channels?

[Colin McDonald]

Originally Posted by Mark Willey

Tom,

Recording surround takes a lot of specialized equipment and experience, not to mention time to set up the microphones. I guess I'm not exactly clear about what the purpose of using surround would be for a live event like a wedding ceremony or reception. What would you like the viewer to hear coming out of the rear speakers and out of the LF channel? One of the many challenges with shooting a live event using surround is that the focus of the sound needs to change with the perspective of the camera...

My advice would be to skip surround and just focus on getting great sound for the front speakers.

Perhaps I've misread your intentions however. What were you thinking you would like to have coming out of the rear and LF channels?

I notice you said "great sound" not "stereo" for the front speakers. This made me think (happens ocasionally) - does anyone consider they always have a "true" stereo soundtrack on their finished product? By that I mean does the final mix give an accurate stereo image of the sound at the event recorded using X/Y , ORTF or M-S or stereo mics?

I suspect that most people use mono laviers and shotguns placed to acquire the sound as cleanly as possible and spend varying amounts of time in post creating a credible stereo image.

Not trying to insult anyone or their work - genuinely curious.

[Mark Willey]

Interesting observations Colin. I've thought about this same thing regarding the assignment of mono sound sources captured during a live event to a stereo sound field. At the moment, most of the work I do involves recording and editing classical music for CD release. Lately, for many of the recordings, we've been using a surround bar made by DPA, supplemented by spot microphones (sometimes stereo pairs) for soloists, piano, and other instruments. A decision then needs to be made about where to route these signals within the stereo field. Of course I'm not describing anything revolutionary here as it's the very basic question faced by every recording engineer and producer.

Like you say, using a pair of mics to capture a stereo sound in the room, supplemented by mono lavs and/or shotgun mic/s for the sources originating from a single location, like people speaking. The assignment of these sources within the stereo field is largely a matter of choice. In mixing an orchestra, I try to preserve the feel of the position of the players by panning them to the right, left or somewhere in between. The same can be done with spoken sources. If you have a reader from the right of the stage and you're lucky enough to be capturing a reasonably well isolated feed you could subtly pan that signal to the right. I'm pretty new here and that's probably super obvious.

[Nicholas de Kock]

Tom you could always buy a Holophone microphone that will encode a 5.1 environment into stereo that your pc will decode appropriately. Costs an arm and a leg. I use Sony Vegas 8 to edit and it has a very user friendly interface that allows you to seamlessly set pans according to the video.

Nicholas

[Martin Pauly]

Hi Colin,

Originally Posted by Colin McDonald

I suspect that most people use mono laviers and shotguns placed to acquire the sound as cleanly as possible and spend varying amounts of time in post creating a credible stereo image.

Not trying to insult anyone or their work - genuinely curious.

Whether stereo or surround sound, I believe there's a place and a reason for both methods: "true" image, and "credible" image. My rule of thumb is that the former is best for music, and the latter is best for audio for film/video (and I am sure there are execptions to this rule). Each have different recording techniques, and different strategies for mixing. It's not that one is better than the other, they serve very different purposes.

- Martin

[Grayson L. Wideman]

I used to work in post at NBC-TV New York. While I was there we did an experiment to decide how we would do baseball in stereo. We sent an extra remote “truck” out to Shea Stadium for a Mets game. We had a number of microphones positioned in the stands and around the field. We recorded to a 2” 24 track tape with the same time code as the video master of the game.

The tapes were brought back the editing room, loaded up and kept in sync by the CMX edit system. We proceeded to try as many combinations of sound stage location as we could think of.

The result came to this: We could do the crowd in full stereo or faked stereo. We could even do some of the sounds from the field that way. But as soon as we moved the announcers even the tiniest bit away from dead center every eye in the edit room moved to that edge of the screen!

This is why when you see a movie in the theater, unless there is a very compelling reason for move the dialogue form center it will be kept in the phantom center of the front stereo pair and reinforced with the center channel.

With a warm Aloha from Honolulu

Grayson