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This topic comprises 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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Topic: How long will Dolby Atmos last?
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-30-2016 01:35 PM
quote: Cloud Zhou
Hundreds of Dolby cinemas are rolling out in the coming years world wide. Hopefully more movies will be mastered in Dolby vision plus Dolby Atmos
I have been watching the pace of Dolby Atmos installations for the past few years since it was first introduced. Progress has been slow. The rate of new installs is very slow in the United States; it looks almost like Atmos has hit a plateau and not gaining any new ground. Some fairly big markets have no Atmos-equipped screens at all: St. Louis, Cleveland, Albuquerque, Tucson, Brownsville-McAllen, Jacksonville, Nashville, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Colorado Springs, El Paso, etc.
In the United States it looks like AMC will be the only exhibitor putting in Dolby Cinema screens, via their own Dolby Cinema @ AMC Prime thing. It looks like a Prime auditorium rather than the futuristic room with all the angled stealth fighter paneling. AMC says they'll install 100 such screens, but they'll take 10 years to do so. Currently they have 16 finished Dolby Cinema @ AMC Prime screens with another 3 installs in progress. That's not much, but it's still a lot more than IMAX with Laser.
AFAIK, no other US theater operators have any plans to install their own Dolby Cinema screens.
quote: Steve Guttag
How are they paying for it? Last I heard, it was hundreds of thousands of dollars, per auditorium. One would have to generate an awful lot of EXTRA revenue in order to pay for it. In some dense markets, I can definitely see it but I suspect in many parts of the planet, there aren't enough people to buy tickets to justify it.
A full blown Dolby Cinema theater with all the stealth fighter decor, like the original JT Eindhoven screen in the Netherlands, cost over $2 million to build and equip. AMC probably is not paying nearly as much to stick with their Prime-oriented decor. The biggest part of the cost is the pair of Christie 4K laser projectors.
I wonder if they include a screen shaker thingie like what Boston Light and Sound is using for their portable big screens. Apparently speckle is a big problem with laser. Something bizarre like a screen shaker is needed to defeat speckle. Wouldn't rapidly vibrating the screen introduce blur and just kill image resolution?
quote: Carsten Kurz
They will come down once MDA is fully standardized and allows competition. Then maybe ATMOS will be the premium MDA system, but not the only object based audio system anymore.
MDA is doing nothing to bring down the cost of installing "immersive audio" -at least not in terms of installing such a thing correctly. The biggest selling point I've heard with MDA is it can allow a movie theater to do immersive audio on the cheap. You end up playing some kind of slightly enhanced surround sound just to get a more fancy name on the marquee unless you roll in the "improved" surround sound into your own theater's fake premium format "experience."
The biggest cost driver in an immersive sound system is all the amplifiers and better quality speakers required not to make the effort a stupid waste of time. It's bad enough a Dolby CP-850 with full Atmos capability costs $26,000 (it used to cost $33,000). If you put Atmos in a theater with 500 seats and a 70 foot screen, you're probably going to blow at least another $40,000 or more on speakers and amps.
An Auro processor costs just about as much as an Atmos processor, but since Auro is really a glorified 5.1 system (that runs in 5.1 almost all the time due to lack of Auro 11.1 titles) not nearly as many amplifiers are needed.
From what I can see DTS' MDA format is in a very murky, ill-defined situation. It sure isn't doing paying customers any favors. There appears to be no dedicated web site, social media presence or anything to tell customers which movies are being mixed and released in DTS' MDA format and specifically which movie theaters are equipped to play it. At least Dolby has both of those listed on their web site, although I really wish they would list how many Atmos screens are at each location.
The suggested speaker layout for MDA looks a lot like Auro. I'm tempted to call it Auro Part 2 and it's playing just as bad due to the lack of title support. If anything MDA is looking even more like a home theater technology than Atmos. Atmos has a very different speaker layout. So the notion of having post production crews create a mix in MDA format and expect it to play on Atmos systems is asking for trouble. It might take a lot more than a firmware update to make a Dolby CP-850 able to play MDA format audio.
Even on the authoring end MDA is very unclear. What digital audio editing applications support the MDA plug-in? Or does MDA have a stand-alone sound editing app? Dolby has something that works with ProTools. To me it looks like MDA is some kind of mysterious beta product.
quote:
I was referring to the whole Dolby Theatre aspect...not just Atmos...Atmos can be cheaper if you don't put in so many speakers. That is one of the potential pitfalls and I suspect it has already happened. There is nothing to stop someone from putting in a Dolby Atmos with just the 7.1 channel configuration and calling it Atmos...there is no minimum standard there. Heck, you can have Atmos on your iPad!
The whole situation has turned into a mess. The lack of standards or being flexible with standards allows for one Atmos theater to be kick ass and another one forgettably lame. The marketing bullshit is an even worse problem. Theater chains create their own home-grown premium priced "process" to sell to customers, hiding the specifics about projection and sound. It's all very misleading. I think IMAX deserves much of the blame for this serious problem. They got the ball rolling by ripping out real large format film projection gear, replacing it with HDTV resolution gear, yet still claiming in the salesmanship it was all still the same and every bit as good -if not a little better since it was digital.
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Cloud Zhou
Film Handler
Posts: 4
From: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Registered: Jan 2016
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posted 03-30-2016 08:34 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
I have been watching the pace of Dolby Atmos installations for the past few years since it was first introduced. Progress has been slow. The rate of new installs is very slow in the United States; it looks almost like Atmos has hit a plateau and not gaining any new ground. Some fairly big markets have no Atmos-equipped screens at all: St. Louis, Cleveland, Albuquerque, Tucson, Brownsville-McAllen, Jacksonville, Nashville, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Colorado Springs, El Paso, etc.
In the United States it looks like AMC will be the only exhibitor putting in Dolby Cinema screens, via their own Dolby Cinema @ AMC Prime thing. It looks like a Prime auditorium rather than the futuristic room with all the angled stealth fighter paneling. AMC says they'll install 100 such screens, but they'll take 10 years to do so. Currently they have 16 finished Dolby Cinema @ AMC Prime screens with another 3 installs in progress. That's not much, but it's still a lot more than IMAX with Laser.
AFAIK, no other US theater operators have any plans to install their own Dolby Cinema screens.
Not sure about US, but in China, 100 new Dolby cinema screens will be open for Wanda Cinemas in the next 5 years.
Since Wanda is the parent company of AMC and Hoyts, I will not be surprised if there are more Dolby cinemas coming in US and Australia too.
Here is a link about the news of 100 Dolby cinemas coming to China
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/wanda-cinema-line-dolby-laboratories-140000849.html
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-31-2016 10:56 AM
quote: Cloud Zhou
Not sure about US, but in China, 100 new Dolby cinema screens will be open for Wanda Cinemas in the next 5 years.
China has over 3 times the population of the United States, so I'm not surprised. But still 100 screens over the next 5 years translates to only 20 new screens per year. That's still not a great installation pace. AMC is planning about 10 new Dolby Cinema @ AMC Prime screens per year in the United States.
The bigger problem here in the United States is no other theater chains supporting Dolby Cinema. I think Dolby needs to get more theater chains on board.
Meanwhile there's hardly any new Atmos sound systems going into American theaters outside of those AMC Prime installations.
Cost and complication are the two big things limiting proliferation of Atmos. Even discounted to $26K the CP-850 is pretty expensive. I don't know if companies such as QSC can bring down the cost per amplification channel without hurting performance/quality. Using QSC's Q-Sys system immersive sound done right in a large room would need around a couple dozen 4-channel power amplifiers, Q-Sys Core Processor, Q-Sys I/O unit and a high quality Ethernet switch. What does a package like that cost? Then there's the speakers, a lot of them. For example, Harkins' Cine Capri theater in Oklahoma City has 50 surround speakers visible, 20 on the side walls, 20 on the ceiling and 10 on the back wall, plus a pair of sub bass systems for timbre matching. I'm sure that adds up to some serious money, even for conventional channel-based surround sound. And then there's the stage channel setup. A whole lot of money can get spent there alone. To me it looks like it would be easy for an immersive sound setup to go well past the $100,000 mark.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-31-2016 02:02 PM
Overall I'm in favor of Dolby pushing a Dolby Cinema approach similar to that of IMAX, where they presumably pay for the sound/projection gear in return for a cut of the box office take. However, I think it's a lousy idea for Dolby Cinema to be confined to AMC branded theaters. They have to get at least some other exhibitors on board.
It might be a challenge getting chains like Regal or Cinemark to install any Dolby Cinema screens since they've put so much into their RPX and XD brands. I think Dolby Cinema would be really good in some of the smaller regional chains that put a little more emphasis on quality, such as Warren Theatres, Alamo Drafthouse and Cinetopia. I would like to see at least some theaters in the Western Hemisphere build some Dolby Cinema screens more like the original design in the Netherlands. While I'm wishing, it would be even better to have a Dolby Cinema setup that had a common height screen.
Dolby Cinema has a distinct advantage over other theater chain based premium labels like RPX, XD, etc. The brand actually establishes a certain higher standard that's worthy of a premium ticket price. Dual 4K laser projection with Dolby Vision capability and Dolby Atmos audio? Yeah, that's more than regular single projector 5.1/7.1 fare that you're going to get in a typical RPX, XD, BigD, etc.
Dolby Cinema even appears more advanced than IMAX with Laser. At least with the Dolby Cinema name you'll know top level gear is installed in the theater. With IMAX you won't be able to tell until after you bought your ticket and watch the movie. IMAX is just IMAX regardless if it's film, twin-2K digital or twin-4K laser with 12 channel audio. IMAX just acts like it's all the same and charges a high ticket price all the same too.
quote: Lyle Romer
I think that standalone Atmos (or any object based sound) just doesn't make enough difference to Joe Public to be worth the investment.
My feeling is you install a sound system like that correctly or you don't do it at all. An Atmos installation done right is going to get some positive attention. I love a really powerful, well tuned sound system. It's one of the things I loved most about the GCC Northpark #1 THX theater in Dallas. Movie theaters that do just enough to get a sound or projection brand on the marquee don't do themselves any favors and they'll impart negative impressions to that fancy sound/projection format.
Harkins originally didn't charge any ticket price premium for its Atmos-equipped Cine Capri theaters, but in the last year or so they added a $1 surcharge. That's still not a deal breaker.
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