Dolby and Avid Promote Next-Gen Audio to Theaters, Sound Mixers

Will 2011 be the year the industry embraces 7.1 surround sound? Dolby and Avid are trying to make it happen. The Dolby Surround 7.1 format rolled out last summer with the theatrical release of Toy Story 3, and over a dozen more titles have followed. The format will really come into its own this summer, with four more-or-less sure-fire blockbusters making their 7.1 debuts. The biggest question might be whether you can find any of these movies playing in 7.1 at a theater near you.
The showcase features being mixed in 7.1 this year include Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Disney/Pixar’s Cars 2, DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda 2, and Paramount’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Those massive titles will each open on several thousand screens in North America alone. Unfortunately, Dolby 7.1 is only available on about 1400 screens worldwide. That’s not bad for the first year of a new sound format, but Dolby would obviously like to get a better foothold quickly.

Booming in the Boonies?

What’s encouraging is where these theaters are popping up. Browsing an interactive Google map set up at the Dolby site shows eight 7.1-equipped theaters in the Los Angeles area (nine if you count the one in Santa Monica) and not quite that many in the New York market, where such high-volume theaters as the Regal Union Square multiplex are not equipped with the technology. But you can see a film in 7.1 in burgs like Raton, New Mexico; Canadian, Texas; or Waterloo, Iowa. To some degree, the format has been riding the coattails of digital 3D, which already demands delivery of a separate digital cinema package to theaters. That hard disk now includes a choice of 7.1 and 5.1 sound mixes.

“The spread of the rooms is quite wide,” Stuart Bowling, Worldwide Technical Marketing Manager at Dolby Laboratories told Film & Video. “We have them in North America and Canada, but we also have 100-plus rooms in China. They’re aiming to have 100 systems online in India for the launch of the first 7.1 Bollywood movie [Dum Maro Dum, opening April 22]. All the major regions have the ability to play 7.1 – Australia, New Zealand, most of Asia-Pacific, and then a breakout [of theaters] throughout the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan.” Theaters get marketing support from Dolby to help get the message out to consumers that they’ve installed an enhanced sound system, including a nice 22-second trailer created with Michael Semanick at Skywalker Sound that directed sounds to the four new “surround zones” created by 7.1.

Tools and Workflow

Avid introduced the new 7.1 stem format in Pro Tools HD 9, released last November, basically extending the existing option for mixing in Sony’s SDDS format – which has a full five speaker channels behind the screen – to steer sounds to the left-back and right-back speakers used by Dolby 7.1. Some of the DigiRack plug-ins that ship with Pro Tools have been updated, as well.

“The addition of [Dolby Surround 7.1] to Pro Tools obviously meant it was available on our control surfaces and our mixing consoles for seamless integration between edit suite and mixing stage,” says Avid Senior Product Manager David Gould. “We also added it as a monitor format on our HD Omni interface. We’re enabling the content creators to work natively within that format, both for theatrical work and for consumer Blu-ray reversioning-type work.”

Bowling noted that the DD+ codecs currently in use by over-the-top broadcasters like NetFlix and Vudu can be used to deliver 7.1 sound to consumers without a major change in infrastructure.

The Payoff Is in the Mix

Rather than approaching 7.1 as an opportunity to add enhanced directional sound effects to an existing 5.1 mix, theatrical sound mixers are doing their predubs and premixes in 7.1, Bowling says, then downmixing those for 5.1 exhibition. “They typically spend half to a full day at the end of the mix doing the final pass to push it down to 5.1,” he explains. “That length of time is dictated by how aggressive they were in using 7.1. For Tron: Legacy, Gary Rizzo used 7.1 to the full. In the scene where the main character first comes into the arena, he set up different reverbs and delays that utilized the four surround zones. All the different crowd chants and announcements were pinging around the room. In the section where they were throwing the discs, you were getting direct hits. As they hit the wall on the screen, they were hitting the left wall or the back wall or even back-left and back-right. They pushed it pretty hard, so when they went back to 5.1 they had to spend quite a bit of time getting the effects as close as they could.”

Intrigued? You can spend some time at NAB next week learning about 7.1 sound. On Sunday at 3:30 p.m., Bowling speaks on 7.1-channel sound at the Digital Cinema Summit, held in room S222 of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Check the Avid booth for Pro Tools demos that show off 7.1 capabilities, or stop by the Dolby booth, where a room will be set up for showgoers to judge the power of 7.1 sound mixes for themselves.