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Documentation for Sounds of Silence in Dolby 5.1 |
This project began long before this semester. It
began with the 1985 film Silverado, the first
film I saw in a THX theater with Dolby surround sound.
Until recently, I had no portable way to
record multi-channel sound, nor had I burned
a Dolby 5.1 DVD. I wanted to do surround sound.
Furthermore, there is a 5.1 system in the ACTLab studio which, except for movies, remained quite virgin to 5.1 experimentation. I have wanted to play with it since I discovered it existed a couple of years ago. I studied the Dolby 5.1 Channel Music Production Guide and recorded 5 voice tracks for channel identification (adding an 80Hz tone for the low-frequency effects (LFE) channel), then successfully exported it from Adobe Audition as a 6-channel PCM recording, but it would only play PCM noise in the ACTLab. I tried to burn it with the DTS format, then Dolby; nothing but stereo at best. I had long exceeded my 3 free DVD Dolby burn trials in Adobe Premiere and had to buy the plug-in (ouch!). Meanwhile, I had created an LFE track by summing |
the 5 recorded tracks, then low-pass filtering the
newly bounced track at 120Hz. I did not filter the
original tracks. That way, if the 5.1 did not work,
I would still have a stereo recording to present.
Joseph Lopez, TA for the ACTLab courses, and I tried to decipher the ACTLab surround system. About a dozen DVDs later, each with a different strategy, and on Thursday night before a Saturday presentation, I heard my voice from each of the proper 5 speakers and the tone from the LFE sub-woofer in the ACTLab. I made a one-minute introduction with images from the recording location and identified each microphone on its proper channel, added the 5.1 edited location recording, and burned a new DVD. Did I say that I do not have a 5.1 system at home? I monitored on location with headphones. I never heard the recording in 5.1 until my presentation. I was happy when I heard the successful channel identification. It is about dream and delirium. |
