Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Authoring audio to play in a Dolby 5.1 equipped commercial theatre

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Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 05-02-2019, 11:46 AM:

Our film department presents a festival at the end of the school year where student film majors have their theses films shown at a local cinema. They hand the "projectionist" BluRays to play for each show (something like 20 titles per show, and three shows per day).

Question is, if they don't author the audio in Dolby 5.1 but rather in 2.0 (Left, Right stereo - which I believe is what they do), will feeding a BluRay HDMI into a typical AUX input of a DCinema setup, will the processor do anything but play back with just Left Screen Channel/Right Screen Channel stereo, or can it create a Center Screen Channel mix for playback? I assume the theatre has to be playing directly off a BR player; you can't ingest a consumer format to a DCinema server, can you?

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 05-02-2019, 05:50 PM:

Why don't you have them convert their flics with DCP-o-matic ?

Some processors can, some processors are set up for matrix decoding on a NonSync port.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 05-02-2019, 06:10 PM:

The safest bet is really to create a 5.1 movie, put the dialog into the center channel and like Carsten mentioned, use DCP-o-Matic to create a proper DCP package out of it.

It's not rocket science to mix something in 3.0 or even 5.1 nowadays, tools like Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer all support it out of the box.

They're film students, so let's try to teach them to do it right, rather than to rely on the odd luck that the audio processor will be able to funnel identical left and right content to the center channel.

And to be honest, if it comes in 2.0, I'd rather play it in 2.0 than to do some remixing myself. [Razz]