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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Topic: Why Dolby EX seems to be going nowhere
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 06-10-2002 06:57 PM
"Working Girl" on DVD is an odd one. Dolby Digital 3.0. Three fronts, no surround and no LFE.I was kind of surprised to find the "Edward Scissorhands" DVD being released in discrete Dolby Digital 4.0. That makes me wonder if Fox simply blew up the discrete 4 channel master for optical Dolby Stereo 4:2:4 to Cinema Digital Sound on the tiny number of 70mm CDS prints that were made. At least in terms of those two discs, their channel nomenclature is listed correctly, as are other previously mentioned discs like "Big Trouble in Little China" with its 4.1 mix. Others are inaccurate, such as "The Abyss" (4.1 instead of 5.1). I think "Die Hard" and "Tron" fall into the same category. To get back onto the Surround EX thing, I'm not sure which is a worse practice: not listing the Surround EX capability at all on the disc or claiming it is "6.1" when it is really 5.1 using a matrixed center surround.
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Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"
Posts: 4247
From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 06-11-2002 05:43 PM
I would suppose that the main reason for a format's demise (e.g. EX) would be that the cinemas didn't embrace it in the first place.This might be due to the added expense of upgrading. As far as audiences are concerned 5.1 Digital is just fine and dandy. The average moviegoer hasn't been properly educated about what EX is. Chances are it wouldn't exactly make that much of a difference with the average moviegoer anyway. Not too many movies coming out with EX and it's already a few years old. You'd think there'd have been more titles in the cinemas. This may be a case of the chicken and the egg: No movies because there are so few cinemas equipped or so few cinemas equipped because it's an underutilized gimmick that customers don't really know or care about. The other problem is that there is/was some confusion when it came to identification on the prints & cans that a given movie was in EX. So the proper application of the technology was (and still is) bound to be a bit spotty. ------------------
~Manny. "The brown acid that is circulating around is not specifically too good." -- An announcement in the film, "Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music."
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Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"
Posts: 4247
From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 06-11-2002 05:50 PM
Bobby:We could easily have 10.2 if a film was mixed with 2 sets of DTS discs, right? Could 1 timecode reader supply data to two DTS units or would we have to stack 2 readers and just have 2 different offsets? We could have it tomorrow!
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 06-11-2002 07:22 PM
Yes, two different sets of DTS discs (each holding their own 5.1 half of a full 10.2 surround track) could very easily be played back on a specially equipped movie theater featuring essentially what amounts to two sound racks.One single time code reader could be split to two DTS machines for the playback. It is not very much different from the two machine setup DTS recommends for 70mm (one for playback and one for backup). It would take a little more work for Dolby Digital to be made into a 10.2 Surround setup. Dolby Digital data would have to be printed along both left and right sproket areas of the print. That would require at least some degree of customization on the film printer. And then you would have the situation regarding the film reader. With those two issues tackled, two DD sound racks could play back a 10.2 track as well. If we ever see 10.2 Surround, the media used may either be DVD-based discs (ROM/R/RW) or even a removable hard disc.
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Joel N. Weber II
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 115
From: Somerville, MA, USA
Registered: Dec 2005
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posted 04-10-2007 07:26 PM
I believe the way EX works is that the LS and RS output of the 5.1 digital sound goes into the EX decoder, and the EX decoder then dematrixes the sound into left surround, back center surround, and right surround. (I'm not sure what's supposed to happen with the surround output of the cat150 card; maybe you're supposed to use a version of the cat150 that lets you turn decoding of the fourth, ``surround'' channel off. Though I think one of the processor manufacturers advocates sending the surround output of this decoder to an overhead speaker; but I'm not aware of any movies that ever expected this speaker to exist.)
It seems like if you wanted to wire a sound rack to play non-EX movies the way they'd been played before you got the EX decoder, you'd need a total of four amplifiers for the surround speakers (assuming you aren't biamplifying) and a relay. In non-EX mode, the LS output of the 5.1 digital sound player goes to the LS and BLS amplifiers, and the RS output from the 5.1 decoder goes to the RS and BRS amplifiers; in EX mode, the left output of the EX decoder goes to LS, and center output of the EX decoder goes to both BLS and BRS, and the right output of the EX decoder goes to the RS amplifier.
I would have thought you wouldn't want the optical preamp card changing the frequency response of the signal as it finds its way into the cat150 card that's doing EX decoding, and it's not obvious to me how you make that part work correctly.
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