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Topic: Dolby's new sound system
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 06-15-2013 06:06 PM
quote: Carsten Kurz
No, IMMSound was more like a 'hybrid' version, that's why Dolby killed it, it was too close to what ATMOS does.
There is some conflicting information out there whether or not Atmos and imm sound share the same ancestors, but after some further reading it sounds more likely that Dolby Atmos was already around for a while and imm sound was primarily acquired to kill a potential competitor and get some useful technology in return too.
quote: Marco Giustini
Thanks Carsten. I though it was a normal channel based system. Am I mistaken or it needed two servers to run?
I don't know if they were using two "servers", the setup I've seen seemed to have just a single machine, but it did store the native soundtrack separately, on that machine and not in the DCP. I guess that was more of a temporary choice to avoid integration, distribution and certification issues.
quote:
Why the IMM was better at 5.1 and 7.1? I think Atmos is just delivering 5.1 and 7.1 to the side and back surrounds as a normal processor would be. I dislike upmixes, so if that is the advantage, it's not for me!
I've heard some 5.1/7.1 -> imm sound upmixes and a 5.1/7.1 to Atmos upmix. They didn't sound any different than good 5.1/7.1 to me. There is only so much you can do with the limited spatial information in a normal 5.1/7.1 mix.
quote: Harold Hallikainen
I THINK Iosono is based on "wave front synthesis" where an attempt is made to synthesize how the sound wave would appear at the location of the speaker array and duplicate that by driving the speaker array.
What both Dolby Atmos and imm sound are doing, is essentially the same what computer games have been doing for the past 15 years or so. They use a 3D sound model and dynamically map it to the speakers/channels that are present in the current configuration. The only really groundbreaking thing is that there are so many potential channels in this new configuration.
The sound model Iosono uses, is essentially the same, but the playback process is different. The Iosono sound system uses a high-density speaker array, probably even denser than a high-end Dolby Atmos install. They use wave field/front synthesis to create something like a sound hologram. Such a system cannot only create sounds that seem to originate from within the room, it also creates a far bigger sweet spot for your surround sound.
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Victor Liorentas
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 800
From: london ontario canada
Registered: May 2009
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posted 06-17-2013 01:31 PM
SAN FRANCISCO — Q: When does an engineering culture that is historically run by consensus learn a new way to speed innovation?
A: When it has to.
Five years ago, cinema owners came to audio pioneer Dolby Laboratories and said they needed better sound systems to draw in more movie viewers.
After considering the idea of merely adding more speaker output channels — a strategy that had been successful for decades — Dolby's product-research division instead undertook an ambitious re-think of the company's technology platform.
The new research initiative focused instead on data input channels, eventually creating a product that lets movie and TV sound editors separate out as many as 128 different sounds and place them spatially anywhere in a theater — from the rustle of a blowing leaf in a corner to the thumping thwack-thwack-thwack of a helicopter rotor overhead.
"We wanted to convey the subtleties of sound, not just its bombastic qualities," says Dolby's Brett Crockett, a senior director of advanced technology research, who describes the new technology as the audio equivalent of high-definition television.
The technology, called Atmos, greatly increases the audio resolution of a dialogue soundtrack or music score — and is smart enough to be customized for individual rooms and speaker types.
LOCATOR: How to find a theater with Dolby Atmos sound near you
On Friday, the movie Man of Steel became the 45th released picture to use the new technology in its first year, eclipsing the company's previous record for technology adoption-rate held by its Dolby Digital 5.1 product.
shinal
John Shinal is a technology columnist covering high-tech stocks.(Photo: USA TODAY)
But turning over Dolby's old platform wasn't easy in an engineering culture that prizes collaboration, Crockett says.
"It was a massive effort, and we're very collaborative," he says of a company that includes many musicians, sound mixers and other audiophiles among its ranks. "Sometimes consensus can take a long time," he said.
It was the largest and longest research project the company had undertaken since the invention of Dolby Digital, and by last year the investment was beginning to take its toll on the company's bottom line.
During the two fiscal years ended in September, the company's operating expenses had shot up 31%, while revenue had remained essentially flat during those 24 months.
By late spring 2012, the Atmos team was under the gun as Pixar, the studio producing the movie Brave, got ready to release its animated feature, which was the first to use the new technology.
Under the Hollywood-imposed deadline, Dolby's Nicolas Tsingos and Jurgen Scharpf worked feverishly in a special screening room within the company's headquarters on the edge of San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood.
Scharpf, a professional movie mixer who'd worked for the post-production company owned by Star Wars creator George Lucas, was trying out Atmos on a sound mixing board and providing feedback to Tsingos, the senior platform manager for Atmos.
"I'd tell Nicolas, 'This would be better than that,' and he sat right here coding it in," Scharpf recounts. "Some days we were doing three full revisions a day."
Tsingos revised the software algorithms, the technology was finished on time, and Brave was a smash hit — providing a big boost to the new platform.
But Tsingos wouldn't have had the authority to make those changes on the fly if Dolby hadn't used a new development strategy for Atmos, Crockett says.
The strategy decentralized decision-making by putting together a small core team drawn from across the company in design, engineering, testing and marketing.
The team had the authority to make important decisions without waiting for approval from higher-ups.
"Once the team took ownership, you could see the velocity (of product development) increase," says Crockett, who called the development of Atmos "one of the most rapid iterative processes" he's ever seen at the company in his 16 years there.
Last week, Tsingos and Scharpf were back in the same screening room where they'd finished the product a year ago, this time to demonstrate the technology for this columnist.
One of the movie scenes the Dolby engineers chose to show off Atmos was the one from Life of Pi in which the main character is in a boat with a tiger amid a school of flying fish.
As the fish crossed the screen from right to left, the whizzing noise they made had the qualities of the Doppler effect, which causes sound waves to bunch up as they approach the human ear and spread out quickly after they pass — much like a speeding bullet or freight train does.
In another video clip, this a promotional one for Atmos, the technology translated the barely perceptible flutter of a seed pod into an audio experience with some oomph, what Crockett describes as "increasing the impact without increasing the volume."
One of the breakthroughs of the technology is the addition of overhead speakers, which help the sound track smoothly across a room and more accurately represent the sound of flying objects.
"We want to move the sound of a helicopter off the (movie) screen and into the room," says Tsingos, who called the result "a 3-D sound field that can be custom-mixed for any theater."
The technology is so powerful that it can lead to states of cognitive dissonance, as when my human brain heard in the room the effects of wind through trees on the screen, yet couldn't feel the breeze I expected.
After that experience, I wasn't surprised to learn that Dolby had employed neurologists and others trained in psycho-acoustics in the development of Atmos.
"Sound has immediacy," Crockett says. "We experience it instinctively and jump away from certain sounds before our brain has even processed what the source is."
As 100 movie screens in the U.S. and 200 worldwide have already installed the technology into their sound systems, I expect a lot of movie viewers will be jumping out of their seats this summer.
John Shinal has covered tech and financial markets for 15 years at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal Digital Network and others.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/shinal/2013/06/16/new-tech-economy-dolby-laboratories-shinal/2422403/
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 06-17-2013 05:41 PM
quote: Steve Guttag
I'm pretty sure that the CP850 does not "upmix" a non-Atmos track into Atmos (it couldn't). It will play the non-Atmos track identically to a non-Atmos processor. It will group the surrounds as they need to be.
The imm sound system specifically marketed the "up-mixing" capabilities of normal 5.1/7.1 sound. Whatever that up-mixing would be. I've not heard a noticeable difference between "up-mixed" and "plain" 5.1/7.1 sound.
Obviously, you could still do some tweaking in the way you map your discrete channels to the speaker array.
You could possibly also employ some "intelligent" algorithms on the audio-stream, but that require a lot of processing power and the result would probably still be questionable at best. Additionally, it would create additional latency (which could be compensated otherwise, but still would complicate things a whole lot).
quote: Bobby Henderson
I've heard some people suggest "Atmos meta data" is merely applied to a standard 5.1 or 7.1 audio track. And that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
It certainly isn't just a metadata layer on top of the 5.1/7.1 audio track. Maybe you could create some "pseudo Atmos" with this kind of thing (a bit like the matrix encoded EX and ProLogic stuff), but Atmos definitely is a real object based sound format. It doesn't necessarily have to be bigger than a traditional multichannel 5.1/7.1 LPCM mix.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Dolby, to some extent, must do a better job with marketing Atmos to the general public. Unfortunately Dolby also needs the cooperation of movie studios and movie theater chains to get the name out there too.
I agree, but new sound formats always have been a bit under-advertised, unlike stuff like "3D".
quote: Bobby Henderson
On the other hand the end credits did list the three obsolescent 35mm film digital sound formats.
Scarlet Letters might actually have to adapt their default end credits template... Although they managed to replace DTS with Datasat a while back ![[Wink]](wink.gif) .
But honestly, the end credits might not be your best marketing tool. It's just strange that Dolby Atmos isn't all over the film posters...
quote: Bobby Henderson
The Dolby Atmos trailer that played before the movie was pretty cool though. It did a better job of demonstrating the directional capabilities of the sound format than the mix of Man of Steel.
Those trailers are obviously made to show off the technology. I still remember a lot of shows, where the Dolby Digital and/or THX trailers were the only thing that could compensate for the crappy movie that followed .
Additionally, just like in the early days of the Digital surround formats, movie makers still need to get a grip on the new features that those new sound formats offer. Compare the movies from the beginning of those formats with the movies right now and you will notice that surround sound has, generally speaking, improved over the last two decades. Just about 10 years ago, most music would only use the L+R channel, nowadays it is quite common to have music playing trough the surrounds.
I guess the main focus for most current releases is still the 5.1/7.1 mix, because that's the biggest install base right now, you cannot afford to have it sound bad on those systems.
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