Nuendo Now In Atmos
- Thread starter Gerhard Westphalen
- Start date
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Gerhard Westphalen
Mastering Engineer (occasionally Scoring Mixer)
I personally don't see it being all that useful for a composer. All I've really heard of it being used for music is Alan Meyerson mentioning that sometimes he delivers some extra reverb stems for them to use in the extra speakers of Atmos but he doesn't do any Atmos himself. I'm not even sure how many people are working in 7.1 (is Alan even doing 7.1?).
It would be interesting to play around and experiment with. The only reason I wouldn't get 2 ceiling speakers now is that I wouldn't be able to watch any films in Atmos (unless I got an Atmos receiver with preamp outs which is quite expensive) so it's not worth it. Once I can decode it in Windows I'll consider getting them but that may never happen since most people watching movies on a computer (without a receiver) aren't even using 5.1.
SterlingArcher
Active Member
I'm pretty sure I remember Hans mentioning he had done a 56 speaker mix for a showing of Amazing Spiderman 2. I remember thinking at the time that that was a hell of a lot of speakers.
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Gerhard Westphalen
Mastering Engineer (occasionally Scoring Mixer)
Any idea where you heard that? Now I'm really curious about that.
colony nofi
Senior Member
A few things worth clearing up.
You can't actually do a full dolby atmos mix in ANY daw without a dolby atmos rendering and mastering unit - a physical device. Also known as the Dolby MRU.
Dolby atmos has 2 differnet kinds of objects. It has "bed" mixes, and "object" mixes.
Part one are bed mixes. These are typically 7.1 or what dolby atmos calls 7.1.4 (the extra 4 channels being vertical channels if needed) which CAN be mixed / premixed in nuendo now without an MRU.
But - dolby atmos itself isn't just this. Its also a system that allows playback of an immersive cinema mix on MANY different speaker systems - up to 64 discreet channels in V1 of the cinema version. How does it do this?
Essentially, it plays back the normal 7.1.4 mix as you'd expect - and interprets it well across all the different speakers in the cinema, however many there are. In a small mix studio - you might only have 7.1+2 ceiling speakers to monitor - and there, you are monitoring 1:1 - each output to a speaker.
However, the MRU also allows 118 sound "objects" - which are essentially individual mono streams with associated positioning meta data in the XYZ plane. These you cannot monitor without an MRU connected.
For instance - you can have a mono gunshot that you pan thru the theatre - and you'd mix the gunshot mono, and then use the new nuendo panner (which then is connected to an MRU) to move the sound thru space as necessary. What is saved is not (up to) 64 discreet channels of audio for direct mapping of playback wav files to individual speakers - but you get just the mono file + the movement meta-data. This movement data can be interpreted by the MRU to be played back on many different speaker systems - and sound as good as possible in each place. Its actually a very clever system - but its also difficult to get your head around at times.
So - the playback system plays back the sound bed PLUS up to 118 objects, all at the same time. It is up to the MRU to interpret sound object streams + their positioning meta-data in order to create the audio that goes to the speakers.
Make sense?
I am not surprized that some music guys want to listen to their music on a large system. BUT - generally speaking, music is mixed as a "bed" - dolby atmos objects seem best suited to special sound fx / sound design. So - although HZ may have been listening on a 56 channel system, I'm *GUESSING* he was listening to a dolby atmos bed mix, which was just being upmixed by the MRU to a large number of speakers in a large cinema space. There is nothing of course wrong with this - and would be an incredible sound.
I would think that moving forward most music will continue to be delivered as 7.1 stems - and only occasionally would you use the extra ceiling stems. We have to be careful not to break the suspension of belief which can already easily happen already with surround music mixes. This is not to say some clever folk will find really interesting things to do with the different channels for music. (And maybe they'll even start using atmos object channels)
I'm doing a lot of research into other panning devices - mostly for custom spaces. I see GREAT use in another new format aside from dolby atmos - which still treats sound as objects, but instead of being designed just for cinema (and more recently, home cinema) it can be configured for any XYZ space and placement of speakers. I've been lucky to work on large channel count immersive installations - and to date we've had to kluge together various solutions to be able to mix. But meta-data mixing is where things are at.
There has been other formats put forward - and some amazing ones at that. Iosono did some amazing work a few years ago on a different custom cinema system that now seems to get more use in experiential / large scale event based audio. And as mentioned, Auro is in the 3D audio space in interesting ways (especially its backwards compatibility to other current formats)
Brendan.
You can't actually do a full dolby atmos mix in ANY daw without a dolby atmos rendering and mastering unit - a physical device. Also known as the Dolby MRU.
Dolby atmos has 2 differnet kinds of objects. It has "bed" mixes, and "object" mixes.
Part one are bed mixes. These are typically 7.1 or what dolby atmos calls 7.1.4 (the extra 4 channels being vertical channels if needed) which CAN be mixed / premixed in nuendo now without an MRU.
But - dolby atmos itself isn't just this. Its also a system that allows playback of an immersive cinema mix on MANY different speaker systems - up to 64 discreet channels in V1 of the cinema version. How does it do this?
Essentially, it plays back the normal 7.1.4 mix as you'd expect - and interprets it well across all the different speakers in the cinema, however many there are. In a small mix studio - you might only have 7.1+2 ceiling speakers to monitor - and there, you are monitoring 1:1 - each output to a speaker.
However, the MRU also allows 118 sound "objects" - which are essentially individual mono streams with associated positioning meta data in the XYZ plane. These you cannot monitor without an MRU connected.
For instance - you can have a mono gunshot that you pan thru the theatre - and you'd mix the gunshot mono, and then use the new nuendo panner (which then is connected to an MRU) to move the sound thru space as necessary. What is saved is not (up to) 64 discreet channels of audio for direct mapping of playback wav files to individual speakers - but you get just the mono file + the movement meta-data. This movement data can be interpreted by the MRU to be played back on many different speaker systems - and sound as good as possible in each place. Its actually a very clever system - but its also difficult to get your head around at times.
So - the playback system plays back the sound bed PLUS up to 118 objects, all at the same time. It is up to the MRU to interpret sound object streams + their positioning meta-data in order to create the audio that goes to the speakers.
Make sense?
I am not surprized that some music guys want to listen to their music on a large system. BUT - generally speaking, music is mixed as a "bed" - dolby atmos objects seem best suited to special sound fx / sound design. So - although HZ may have been listening on a 56 channel system, I'm *GUESSING* he was listening to a dolby atmos bed mix, which was just being upmixed by the MRU to a large number of speakers in a large cinema space. There is nothing of course wrong with this - and would be an incredible sound.
I would think that moving forward most music will continue to be delivered as 7.1 stems - and only occasionally would you use the extra ceiling stems. We have to be careful not to break the suspension of belief which can already easily happen already with surround music mixes. This is not to say some clever folk will find really interesting things to do with the different channels for music. (And maybe they'll even start using atmos object channels)
I'm doing a lot of research into other panning devices - mostly for custom spaces. I see GREAT use in another new format aside from dolby atmos - which still treats sound as objects, but instead of being designed just for cinema (and more recently, home cinema) it can be configured for any XYZ space and placement of speakers. I've been lucky to work on large channel count immersive installations - and to date we've had to kluge together various solutions to be able to mix. But meta-data mixing is where things are at.
There has been other formats put forward - and some amazing ones at that. Iosono did some amazing work a few years ago on a different custom cinema system that now seems to get more use in experiential / large scale event based audio. And as mentioned, Auro is in the 3D audio space in interesting ways (especially its backwards compatibility to other current formats)
Brendan.
