Dolby 5.1 for us?

[Emery Wells]

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

[Hans Henrik Bang]

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

[Zac Stein]

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

[Hans Henrik Bang]

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_...dts/dolby.html

Hans Henrik

[Zac Stein]

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

[Rob Lohman]

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!