I've been working, together with Kieran Tyrrell of Sonalksis, on the
design of a usable 3D audio production system for the past couple of
years as part of my MA at the University of Wales Newport. [I should
explain that I am a 'mature' student (52) and previously worked for a
couple of decades in the pro-audio industry designing control surface
and mixing automation systems for a number of companies.]
I'm trying to get my head around what Dolby are doing here and as far as
I can see, they are effectively splitting the function of the mixing
console across the dubbing room and the movie theatre. By keeping the
individual sound objects and their associated mix data (metadata)
seperate, they can then perform the final mix in the movie theatre
(using the Dolby Atmos Cinema Processor for rendering to whatever
speaker array they have installed).
We call our own system DOME (Digital Object-oriented Mix Engine)
because, early on in the process, we realised that to produce a
format-agnostic production tool we had to seriously re-evaluate the
traditional mixing paradigm and came up with what we call audio animation.
Basically, all inputs, channels, sources etc. are sound objects. These
sound objects can be atomic ( a single entity) or molecular (a group of
atomic and/or other molecular objects). We don't make a distinction
between beds and objects as Dolby appears to.
The challenge has been coming up with a meta-language to control these
objects both in terms of a descriptive language and the choice of
physical controllers to manipulate these parameters.
We are currently mixing to a 3rd order b-format mix bus (16 channels) to
capture the 3d and act as an archival format. The choice of output
format is then made in the master section by using appropriate decoders.
It looks like we will be able to implement an additional output file
format which will essentially capture the objects and mix data before
they hit the mix bus and, hopefully, format the information to suit the
Dolby Atmos playback format.
I have to confess to a sacrilegious view in terms of this forum - I
don't give a monkeys about the ins and outs of compression, distortion
etc - what drives me is the pragmatism of coming up with the tools that
will enable creative people to produce stuff that will entertain me and
as many other people on the planet as possible. Life is short and I want
to enjoy as much of it as possible. (I am also sure that once we crack
the functionality, we can then make sure that the audio is a pristine as
possible)
My sister-in-law is a professional opera singer - I once caught her in
her kitchen listen to Radio 3 on a badly tuned Amstrad radio. I asked
her how she could listen to it and she said... "I can still hear the tune"
Simon Edmonds - 3D Audio Design
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