The Following is an AI generated transcript of this episode. Please excuse any typos or translation mistakes made by the algorithm .
Timothy Muirhead 0:00
Hey everybody, welcome to Tonebenders. My name is Tim and I will be your host and sitting with me is René, how you doing René? Hey, what’s up? So we are in the Soundcrafter studios and we have brought together a panel of esteemed colleagues to talk about kind of “ATMOS For the rest of us”. We’re going to word it that way. We all know about Skywalker Ranch, and their work with ATMOS on the big tentpole films, and we know about how Warner Brothers and Sony and L.A. are all doing ATMOS. But today we’re going to try and talk about ATMOS without using this word in a derogatory sense, smaller projects. In maybe not physically smaller rooms, but for smaller facilities. So with me, we have Renee who works at Dallas Audio Post. We all know René and Dallas Audio Post recently did a big ATMOS install…
René Coronado 0:42
Our big ATMOS upgrade that happened in 2019. And it took months it was it was a big deal. It was a big process, I guess.
Tim Muirhead 0:48
Yeah. So we’re going to talk about that process and maybe see if we can find some do’s and don’ts for the listeners, maybe avoid some of the pitfalls that others have fallen into. Also joining us today is Korey Pereira. Korey is the owner and creative director of Soularity Sound, a small post production company based in Austin, Texas, where he’s working on everything from student films to features to immersive audio. He’s in the final stages of upgrading his space for ATMOS. Korey, can you tell us a bit about the work you’ve been doing lately?
Korey Pereira 1:15
We kind of do a spattering of projects, kind of whatever comes in the door is what we work on that day. I also have the good fortune of also working here at Soundcrafter. So I’ve worked on Linkletter’s last four films, we do a lot of TV and some really cool independent films. On top of that, when I’m not working in film, I’m actually teaching over the University of Texas this last semester. I’ve also taught down at Texas State University as a guest lecturer.
Timothy Muirhead 1:40
So you have no free time.
Korey Pereira 1:42
Not so much.
Timothy Muirhead 1:47
We also have joining us: Nicole Auranger. Nicole is soon to be graduate of Texas State University’s sound recording technology program. She freelances as a location and post production mixer on various student films and indie films. She’s written and directed two of her own short films, which are about to be mixed in Atmos for her capstone project. Welcome.
Nicole Auranger 2:08
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Glenn Eanes 2:10
So what are these two films that you’ve written and directed?
Nicole Auranger 2:13
Um, I tend to write dramas so they’re kind of little short dramas. And luckily, my professor at our studio is very on top of the game, so he installed ATMOS. So I’m very lucky to get the opportunity to learn to mix while I’m in school in ATMOS, so that’s incredible.
Glenn Eanes 2:33
That makes me very jealous.
Nicole Auranger 2:34
Yeah, I know.
Timothy Muirhead 2:36
And finally joining us today we have Glenn Eanes. In addition to editing and mixing sound and many narrative and documentary features, Glenn has served as the re recording mixer on well over 100 episodes of TV. Welcome, Glenn. Tell us a bit about some of these TV shows.
Glenn Eanes 2:50
Lots of the stuff we get here in Austin, I work primarily out of Soundcrafter, even though I do some freelance stuff on my own. Our reality TV docu-reality kind of shows, Sports shows, fat people shows, those kinds of things. But I’ve also done narrative films and documentary work and things like that. I primarily am a recording mixer and Foley mixer.
Timothy Muirhead 3:13
So when we talk about Atmos, why are you all interested in getting into it? Korey do you want to go first?
Korey Pereira 3:21
Yeah, sure. So Glenn and I actually went out to LA the last two years, to attend the Mix: Sound for Film event. And two years ago, in 2018, I went out there and had the good fortune to talk to the folks from Avid and talk to the folks from Dolby and really realized that something was happening and that this format was actually going to stick around. So that was in October, in early November, I started plotting my plan to upgrade my home studio to ATMOS, I was getting out a piece of paper and figuring out what that would actually take. I would say luckily, the process has gone a lot slower than I initially intended it to go. But in that delay, I think it’s kind of shaped the way I set up my studio, and I’ll hopefully be finishing it here in the next month or two.
Glenn Eanes 4:05
Yeah. And the technology has changed since you started as well, to actually make things easier for you. And cheaper.
Korey Pereira 4:11
yeah, and cheaper,
Glenn Eanes 4:12
which is a good thing for smaller studios.
Korey Pereira 4:14
Yep, I’m sure we might get into the technical part of it later. But originally, when I was looking at it, you have to have an HDX two system, I was going to have to have an RMU and a whole separate computer. And now it’s evolved to the point that with the action tool kit, you can actually have the time alignment that was missing before. So well, if I’m working on a big film, I’m going to come over to Soundcrafter. Or we’re going to go out to LA to finish it. But for the lower budget things, I can now work natively in ATMOS and using a one system setup I can actually print out the masters at home on my computer, which is huge.
Nicole Auranger 4:48
And just as far as an impetus for Dallas Audio Post, I mean, it’s just fundamentally the fact that Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and everybody else has ATMOS as their baseline deliverable these days.
Korey Pereira 4:59
Absolutely.
René Coronado 5:00
They consider 5.1 and 7.1 to be legacy formats and they consider ATMOS to be like your primary deliverable. So to do work on TV at all anymore, you kind of have to be able to do it.
Glenn Eanes 5:12
Yeah. And that’s what is making everybody so interested in this. The people who are thinking, you know, maybe I’ll wait longer are like, “No, I’ve got to get on this now”. Yeah. So what’s the first step in getting on it?
Nicole Auranger 5:24
You got to spec your system, right?
Korey Pereira 5:26
Yeah. A lot of reading.
Glenn Eanes 5:29
Yeah, a lot of technical information you kind of have to absorb and then yeah specking your system making sure you have the right equipment or purchasing the right equipment to do it.
René Coronado 5:37
And some of that’s just research on you know, the Avid site and and on the Dolby site and yeah,
Glenn Eanes 5:42
they have the tool that they have where you can spec your room you put in your room, size and everything like that.
René Coronado 5:49
But an important part is kind of what we’re doing here, which is to go talk to people that have gone through the process, or just figure out what the heck is common, because it’s it’s not as easy as putting up more speakers. There’s more to it than that.
Glenn Eanes 6:01
Yeah, I used to work in the tech industry. And it’s a lot of those IT skills kind of coming back, especially in smaller studios, having to be the person who knows how to run all the equipment, how to troubleshoot all the equipment and everything like that, which the bigger studios hire people specifically to do that, a whole department.
Exactly. So Nicole as someone who’s going through school, how are you finding it? Are your professors able to teach ATMOS? Do they know it, or are they learning it as you’re learning it?
Nicole Auranger 6:32
Yes, they don’t know anything about it. So when I told him, he installed it, and I told him, Well, this is perfect. I can do this for my capstone project. I can mix it in ATMOS, and his first words were “awesome. You’ll have to teach me how to”. So from the start, I was like, Okay, this will be an experience. But luckily, I met Korey, because he taught one of our classes. And so I’ll have some help. But yeah, it’s definitely been a lot of looking up YouTube videos and reading stuff online. Korey just came down and fixed our I/O. So now we can actually do it. So it’ll just be a lot of getting in there and messing around.
And kind of as we’re talking about a second ago, you know, that the ATMOS technology and the spec is continuing to change and evolve. I mean, from when we installed a year ago, it’s different than what it is now. And so I have no idea like, we could not at Dallas Audio Post done a DIY upgrade, we had to consult with Dolby, and with our architect and with Meyer Sound. We had to pay a lot of people, a lot of different people, a lot of money to come in and design and implement the actual upgrade. I imagine that’s a little bit different now. Right?
Glenn Eanes 7:44
Yeah, I mean, we at Soundcrafter, we’re in a bit of a similar boat. When we had this studio built. We had this room built for what we thought would be required in terms of a room for ATMOS at that time, but like we’ve been talking about the ATMOS stuff has changed from that period to now. So we’re having to do a little bit more construction to get this room setup. But luckily, it’s not that much more construction, you know, we’re gonna have to add another speaker to the back wall and getting all the speakers installed to the ceiling and that kind of thing. But we already have mounts for most of the speakers on the ceiling, and the positioning of the speakers was thought out ahead of time too. So we’re not having to totally rip the room apart, which is, which is an excellent thing.
René Coronado 8:29
We had to rip our room apart.
Rene Coronado 8:32
Well, and some of that was because our room was built, our room was designed and built, I think the year before the ATMOS spec came out. And what you have to go through is, is you have to get drawings put together, and you have to send them to Dolby, and then Dolby has to sign off on it, if they’re going to actually certify the room. And so they’ve got their spreadsheets and they’ve got some very kind of wrote static formulas about how things should look. Problem with our room is that their formula put our speakers out in the hallway?
Nicole Auranger 9:03
And That’s an issue?
So there’s always there’s always a human element, right? There’s always some negotiation that you end up having to do with Dolby to be like, Hey, this is the plan. Do you feel like this is going to work and Dolby is also less inclined right now to do dual purpose certifications. In other words, they don’t want to certify the same room for both theatrical and for home theater. But lots and lots of rooms are being put up all over the planet that do both. And so Dolby is kind of having to make a decision on how many of those they’re going to certify in both directions. It didn’t make sense for us to only go with one certification. Because it’s it was important for us to be able to do theatrical release, Dolby print masters, you know, given the fact that there’s just not a lot of stages that are capable of that in our part of the world. Yeah, so it’s something that that we felt was important, but the majority of our work was going to be home theater release. And you know, with home theater release, you don’t, it doesn’t require somebody on Dolby’s payroll to fly over to our place and print master, which is the case with theatrical. So we had to have both. And they both had to be in the same room. And eventually we just kind of like, we had to put it to Dolby that, “hey, this has to go down this way or it’s not going to go down at all”. And eventually, we mapped out a plan with regards to speaker placement and everything else to where they were going to be okay with it. But it took a lot of wrangling between Dolby and Meyer Sound and Francis Manzella architect to get everybody on the same page before even the first nail got driven. So yeah,
Unknown Speaker 10:39
yeah, and for the theatrical ATMOS, just the sheer cubic foot space requirements of the rooms, makes it prohibitive for a lot of studios.
Timothy Muirhead 10:51
So what lessons have you learned?
René Coronado 10:55
Well, like there’s there’s a lot. Yeah, there’s a bunch of different places to learn lessons, like with rush to the planning and the execution, but that’s not even getting into the actual content creation and mixing. Yeah.
Glenn Eanes 11:07
Yeah, I mean, in terms of room stuff, stupid things like, you know, make sure that your ceiling speakers are not casting shadows on the projector. Yeah. Like if your room wasn’t designed for that in the first place. That’s a real potential issue that …..
René Coronado 11:20
We had to scare with that. Yeah. Because we had to hang truss and we had to hang speakers in front of that projector and we had to basically go into our box and raise the projector up and shoot the angle down a little bit more just so we could clear those speakers.
Timothy Muirhead 11:33
Yeah. So that’s something that no one’s thinking about when they’re starting to dip their toe in this kind of thing.
René Coronado 11:37
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Timothy Muirhead 11:39
So you, Korey, you’re in your home studio. Are you doing this? How are you tearing your home apart and everyone else in the home being okay with this?
Korey Pereira 11:49
Oh, very carefully. Which is probably why it’s taken a little longer than I’ve liked. But one thing that I think is really nice, is kind of doing it in the DIY route, that I’m kind of taking a completely opposite approach from what y’all are doing or what we’re doing here in Soundcrafter. I had some good conversations with the folks at Dolby and got good direction on making sure my room did actually meet the volume spec for home theater certification, but I’m not necessarily going through the process. So as far as me for gear, I decided to go with all JBL Harman products, which just made it a little bit easier that I could talk to the people over at JBL, and they can point me in the right direction and make sure that yes, on the Dolby spec sheet, it says this gear will work, but then I can actually talk to the engineers over JBL to see how it will all fit together. So for me, one big consideration was like how to have 11 speakers in your home office without having to do massive electrical work. So one of the big decisions I made is that I wanted to have passive speakers for the surrounds and overheads. So I decided to go with the JBL 7 series speakers so my LCR are powered the 708Ps but for the surrounds and the overheads I went with the 705i which are passive. So the nice thing is their voiced the same but I just had to run a speaker cable. so for me it’s getting speaker cables up there. I can pull cables I’ve worked in A/V before, you poke some holes and you know swear a little bit and eventually it’ll work so I’m capable of doing that and that seemed a lot easier than having to have like electrical ports were all the speakers were going to go
Nicole Auranger 13:20
It’s true that’s one of those considerations you don’t think of and you’re like “damn, I gotta run power to all of the speakers in this room”.
Glenn Eanes 13:26
Oh, yeah.
Korey Pereira 13:27
Right and and that’s why I ended up on the 7 series, just for me tuning wise I wanted something that was voiced very similar, they all sound the same. They surprisingly the little ones sound very similar to the large ones. And then I went with their Intonato box for tuning is again it worked in the ecosystem and then I use the crown DCI eight 300 n is an amplifier and that will connect actually to the Intonato through a single Ethernet cable. So for me it was just like trying to find the easiest way to get to ATMOS. And again, luckily with the production tool kit, letting you actually do masters and not have any of the RMU it really cut down on my gear. That I have an HD native card and an old cheese grater Mac that, you know has 12 cores and I you know shoved I think 96 gigs of RAM in, an SSD and it actually runs really well you can add on a couple of voice packs, you can have the rMu running on the same computer and it all works. So for me, it’s just like getting it down to one tall space rack worth of gear and then try to make the wiring as simple as possible. So I’ve wired up the surrounds next to the overheads, I’ve little holes poked and just need to get it from A to B and have enough downtime between everything else I do to actually do it. But for me, it was just like finding the easiest solution to get there because ultimately if I work on something big enough, I’m going to come here to Soundcrafter or I could book time at Dallas Audio Post or go out to LA and a studio to do the final.
René Coronado 14:42
Are you gonna fly a sub in your surrounds?
Korey Pereira 14:45
I am not. So I’m actually bass managing the overheads. And then I have one sub up front, which is like on the cusp of being enough. It’s a pretty small room. It’s 11 by 14 and about nine and a half feet tall.
Nicole Auranger 15:00
If you can figure out a way to get full frequency behind you, it’s gonna make a difference. Yeah.
Korey Pereira 15:05
And I know that’s one thing that Tom the owner here at Soundcrafter…….
Unknown Speaker 15:08
That’s one of the you know, that’s one of the great advancements that Atmos really brings to the table is full frequency, heightened surrounds, you know what if you go watch EndGame or whatever, and you have giant spaceships flying over the top of you and you feel the low end, like it’s a weird thing, you actually do perceive the low end behind you. And that it ends up being like one of the most compelling reasons to even do anything in ATMOS in the first place is the frequency behind you.
Glenn Eanes 15:36
Yeah. Well, also shout out to Brittany Pereira Korey’s wife, who is allowing him to install all of that and
Korey Pereira 15:43
She’s mostly going along with it, being supportive. So, Glenn and I went out to the Mix event in LA in September this year. And part of what we did while we were out there is we actually booked some studio tours. So we went to The Dub Stage and talked to Marti and he showed that room…
Timothy Muirhead 16:00
Marti Humphreys.
Korey Pereira 16:01
Yes.
Glenn Eanes 16:01
Yeah. And he’s also consulted with us.
Korey Pereira 16:04
Yeah, he’s great. And again, like he’s fantastic. And he has an amazing room. So part of it was like going into that space and understanding the whole scope of what you’re doing. And then going over to the Sony lot and hearing demos from all these great sound crews, what ATMOS can be. So I think definitely my personal experience my wife saw that and …..,
Glenn Eanes 16:23
We took we took our wives along to that the tour of the dub stage. And to be honest, Marti has like the best sounding ATMOS room that I’ve heard personally so
Nicole Auranger 16:34
yeah, his room is also hyper flexible. He can do way more than even then ATMOS. He’s got all the other immersive formats
Korey Pereira 16:40
Oh yeah, ATMOS, 12.0 6.0, I think the whole gambit
Glenn Eanes 16:43
DTSx and AURO 3d and everything. Yeah, he has like 49 speakers in that room. Yeah.
Korey Pereira 16:47
And a lot of times, I don’t even know how many sets
René Coronado 16:52
and he’ll flip from format to format like,
Korey Pereira 16:55
oh, all on an iPad. It’s amazing.
Timothy Muirhead 16:57
Yeah. So something I want to ask about that is, I don’t think kind of figured out yet, is on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. Once you’ve spent all this money, you built the room, you’ve installed the speakers. Are clients willing to pay more? Or do they want to pay the same price? And just get ATMOS?
Glenn Eanes 17:19
I mean, clients are always going to want to pay this the same price.
Timothy Muirhead 17:22
I guess I mean not if they want to, are we going to be able to charge them?
Korey Pereira 17:26
Honestly, I will kind of say like at the last mix event that was a topic that came up and officially you’re not supposed to charge more for your room when you’re mixing ATMOS,. If your room happens to have ATMOS, that’s what you charge for the room. I think the only thing that may factor in is just like more mix time to kind of deal with the minutiae of deciding when to pan things
René Coronado 17:44
In Practice ATMOS just takes longer
Korey Pereira 17:46
Yeah, but I know something that Glenn and I are big proponents of is just starting to mix an Atmos. So for example, I’m supervising a feature this coming year. And it’s a drama it doesn’t necessarily need to be an Atmos but I’m choosing to do it natively and Atmos just to get into the flow of it. And if you become part of that, it’s easier to just do it in ATMOS. And there are definitely a lot of…
Timothy Muirhead 18:07
Future proofing as well.
Korey Pereira 18:07
Future proof! and again, like you never know, they might sell on Netflix. And they may need an ATMOS mix. So why not do the ATMOS mix and then make the 5.1, make the 7.1, make the stereo that they actually need. But I think just having that in your back pocket is something that I used to do a lot like when I moved from working in stereo to 5.1, that at some point, I just did everything in 5.1, even though they needed a stereo and I gave them a stereo mix. Then six months later, they call up in a panic need a 5.1 mix, so I could be like, Oh, it’s no problem. We did a 5.1 mix, I just didn’t give it to you, I can just spit it out.
Glenn Eanes 18:40
Yeah, we mix our TV in 5.1 and crush it down to stereo as needed. Even though most of the deliveries are in stereo, but sometimes they’ve come back to us, back in the day when they released DVDs, and said “hey, we’re doing a DVD release, can we do 5.1?” And we had all those mixes on hand. So I think moving away from those quote/unquote “legacy formats”, which is what we’ve all been working in and are still currently working into. ATMOS is a huge deal. And I think part of it, particularly for low budget projects, is going to fall on us to educate our clients about what ATMOS can do for them. And get those clients, you know, excited about ATMOS and used to using ATMOS so we can continue working with them in ATMOS because I think telling stories using ATMOS is amazing. It’s an amazing tool for us to work with.
Nicole Auranger 19:30
I feel like we’re still waiting on the killer app for ATMOS and I think it’s going to really rely on headphone consumption. Dolby has a codec where you can feed it an ATMOS mix and it will do the HRT…. Well, it won’t do HRT. It’ll do a binaual translation of the mix. And it works. Right. The problem is the technology is not very easily accessible. The only place where you can actually run Atmos mix through that binaural decoder is like on a PC, or with specific software or on an Xbox. I think the newer iPhones are starting to have it.
Korey Pereira 20:10
Yeah, I think the 11
Nicole Auranger 20:12
I think the 11 is going to have it. If that gets widespread adoption and people start actually being able to experience ATMOS mixes in headphones. I think that’s going to be…
Timothy Muirhead 20:21
Those are just regular headphones?
René Coronado 20:22
Regular headphones. Yes. Yeah.
Korey Pereira 20:24
So it’s all in the actual device. It’s doing the decoding.
Nicole Auranger 20:27
I think that’ll be a sea change because, I mean, just the math and the technology of that has come light years. So I in my house, I have a just a stereo setup for my receiver. Like I have a stereo receiver with two big speakers and I don’t have a surround setup in my house. But the receivers got tech in it, that it shoots the room, and it can make a spaceship fly over my head just by just by pre sending things out. And it works works great. You know, who knew? Yeah, watching Star Wars and The Mandalorian is coming over my head. It’s awesome.
Glenn Eanes 20:59
And they have Atmos home theater sound bars with up firing speakers and all kinds of stuff. So I think that Dolby is making a huge push to get ATMOS in every device that they can. And when I worked in the tech industry, a long time ago, I worked at an audio company, we made audio chips. And I mean, even at that time, we were partnering with Dolby, so, you know, they always are trying to get their technologies into every device they can, and that will affect us.
Nicole Auranger 21:25
Yeah, not necessarily just even ATMOS but any of these immersive formats if they’re not going to necessarily require immersive installs to be consumed. And that’s, really wild,
Glenn Eanes 21:36
that’s really object based formats. Yeah, really give you that capability to, you know, mix it down or crash it down to like a binaural and still get spatialization, which is great. I mean, that’s one of the things that I’m really excited about with this.
René Coronado 21:49
Yep.
Korey Pereira 21:50
So I think it’s a lot more agnostic to, that they like Amazon echoes that supported the mix in that format. It can play on any device.
Nicole Auranger 21:57
Yes, I feel like that’s the biggest concern about people like should I spend all this money to get this equipment and get it into my room? Is Why would I make something in ATMOS that people can’t listen to it? But I don’t think people understand that the capabilities of Atmos at least from from what I’ve watched and what I’ve heard is that even the down mixes from ATMOS are more capable than what the legacy mixes can do.
René Coronado 22:21
Yeah.
Nicole Auranger 22:22
And all these newer improvements with the phones and stuff like maybe we can start listening in ATMOS
Glenn Eanes 22:27
Yeah, I think Dolby is going to make a big push on the headphone front because they are starting to push it into music. And people are mixing music and ATMOS now and that’s mostly consumed through headphones. Yeah. So that technology I think will only get better
René Coronado 22:40
While we were doing our install. You know, well, I guess so. So Roy, who’s our lead mixer does a lot of you know TV mixes as well and he’ll do the same thing. He mixes them in five one and then crushes them down to stereo when there’s the stereo delivery format, his opinion of his stereo mixes that come from five one is that they’re better mixes them when their stereo native because he can place things in place. In a way that translates well, right. Brian Pennington who’s the who’s a Dolby guy, that was installing with us has a similar mentality with regards to ATMOS native going down to 5.1. I don’t know. I don’t know if that translates all the way down to stereo all the way down to the speaker off of your phone mono. But at least from ATMOS to 5.1 that’s Brian Pennington from ATMOS, that’s his opinion is that I’m doing an ATMOS native, it’s gonna give you a better 5.1 mix then if you do 5.1 native.
Glenn Eanes 23:28
and at the CAS or CAS mpse Mix event. Could I just CAS because I’m a CAS member Korey’s MPSE member and so you know how that works out, but at the MIX event, that’s what all the mixers who’ve been using it for a long time have been saying. The 5.1 crashdown from ATMOS in a lot of cases sounds better than just a nati vely mixed 5.1. However they’re doing that math for the spatialization just gives you something different that you can’t do in native 5.1.
René Coronado 23:57
Well, I think it’s fundamentally it’s it’s just because you can You’ve got more resolution with regards to where you’re putting things. Yeah. So because you have more resolution, you just end up making better decisions or you end up making more nuanced decisions.
Glenn Eanes 24:08
Yeah.
René Coronado 24:09
And I think that translates, right. So
Glenn Eanes 24:11
yeah, yeah. And they were saying, you know, the more speakers in your room you can get when you’re mixing, ATMOS, the better, because it does give you that resolution. And the nuance.
René Coronado 24:20
Yep.
Glenn Eanes 24:21
So how much longer does it add to a mix? If I’m going to do a film? That’s going to take me five days mix in a 5.1? What am I adding to that to get an Atmos Mix?
Nicole Auranger 24:34
It depends entirely on your film. It depends on how much stuff you’re moving around, right? Because, or at least how much stuff you’re putting out in space. Because you do have to organize your session in such a way that you’re assigning stuff to tracks, to object tracks, and then you have to go in and in automation, pan the track and you got to do that almost like track by track, right? So you can’t like take a group of things and do a thing.
Glenn Eanes 24:57
So if I have a plane flight overhead. And that plane is made up of seven sounds. I’ve got a pen each of those seven individually. Is there a way to copy and paste so they move at the same time?
René Coronado 25:10
Nope.
Timothy Muirhead 25:11
Oh boy.
Korey Pereira 25:12
I mean, one thing I have found and this is something, I tend to be a little more strategic as far as like how I mix because I usually work on lower budget things and don’t have a lot of time. So what I’ll usually do when I’m doing sound design, I’ll essentially pre dub some of my effects so if I know five or six things are going to go together and I feel really good about them. I’ll actually crash them down to a single element so that when I do start panning things only have to worry about one thing Yeah, or if it’s something that’s a little more nuanced, I might split it out to maybe two or three sounds so I’ll take those 10, 12, or 14 sounds and make the decision as the designer who’s also the mixer to make it one track that I have to deal with so that helps a little bit.
Nicole Auranger 25:50
it helps a lot yeah, I’ve found that so just in some of our just sound design experiments right is like hey we got we got Atmos now let’s make some stuff right. Yeah. You know, we you know, I did a thing where you I had 15 things going it going all over. And then I had like later in the same piece, I had just one big thing that did a big move, because the big thing was full frequency and and because you get full frequency and ATMOS, I was able to take, you know, a stereo track and just make it sound huge. And the composite of something that was built from 10 tracks didn’t sound necessarily any different. I guess. It wasn’t you know, if I’m not doing different panning things
Glenn Eanes 26:27
if it moves as one object
René Coronado 26:28
moves as one object then just crush it down.
Korey Pereira 26:30
And I know definitely as far as like object allocation one thing I have done actually have a hybrid of some of them are actually sending in stereo and some are Mono. So that does kind of help at least, you don’t have to necessarily just use stereo or just use mono like the templates are. You can kind of mix those up a little bit.
Glenn Eanes 26:45
Yeah, and I think that is really one kind of big workflow changes, just that preparation. And doing like making sure you have all of your objects, object tracks allocated to certain groups that you need. Your dialogue, FX, music, and all that kind of stuff. Planning all that ahead makes for a much smoother mix.
Nicole Auranger 27:04
Yep. Did you get all the way through an Atmos mix yet?
No, because our room was on a construction basically all semester until we had his class and he just fixed the I/O as the semester ended.
Korey Pereira 27:15
So we’re gonna have to revisit it.
Nicole Auranger 27:18
revisit it? But I’m ready. Yeah, I’ve got the knowledge now. Now I just have to do it.
Korey Pereira 27:24
So you also do a lot of music. Are you gonna start mixing music and Atmos?
Nicole Auranger 27:30
Um,I haven’t recorded anything recently. But one of my friends she is doing a lot of live sessions. So I was thinking about bringing up to her getting one of those 360 cameras and possibly doing a session in that and then putting that in ATMOS. Yeah, I think that would be really, really cool for people to watch.
Timothy Muirhead 27:48
Definitely.
René Coronado 27:49
Yeah, put up an ambisonics mic.
Nicole Auranger 27:51
Yeah, we have one, and we have one too.
René Coronado 27:53
I’ve done one experiment where I took an Ambisonic recording and tried to fold it all the way out and it was the with the Sennheiser AMBEO, Which is not my favorite ambisonics mic.
Korey Pereira 28:02
Yeah, I have one of those too, it’s a good price point.
Nicole Auranger 28:05
Well honestly I like the Rode one, well actually I like the SoundField one best. I haven’t I haven’t been able to A/B the SoundField versus when Rode bought that mic. But I like that mic a lot better. And it costs less than
Korey Pereira 28:18
Yeah, unfortunately I bought it before that was out.
René Coronado 28:23
But I’ve done the up mix into ATMOS and I didn’t love it.
Glenn Eanes 28:30
What was the recording of?
René Coronado 28:32
it was a crowd. That’s not what I do. I record crowds.
Korey Pereira 28:36
So I find like the Ambisonic work I have done I’ve done some 360 videos, and I’ll start with the ambisonic and track and then pepper in things. So we have a fantastic foley artist here in town, Susan Fitzsimon that works that actually this room also doubles safale stage and I worked on a 360 video so I got some Ambisonic recordings as kind of a bed, but then had Susan come in and we actually recorded it for the 360 video and like point sourced, chose things and actually built it up from there.
René Coronado 29:05
Yeah.
Korey Pereira 29:06
So I think that helps. I like the energy you have that things are definitely moving? Yeah. But then I pick up the things that aren’t really tracking right, in the sound field and then we’d foley them or go into the effects library and just like build up this whole bed underneath it.
Nicole Auranger 29:19
I think first order ambisonics can up mix fairly okay, but it’s limited. I think you get you get further than 5.1 and it starts really falling apart.
Korey Pereira 29:27
Yeah, the images just fuzzy.
René Coronado 29:30
Yeah.
Timothy Muirhead 29:30
So as the person at the table who has limited, will not even limited, zero ATMOS experience. The thing that I’m completely baffled by and do not understand is monitoring and getting your levels because you still have to hit spec. But not everything’s going through your meters, right.
Glenn Eanes 29:52
Right. Yeah, again, I haven’t delivered a show yet in ATMOS. but from Everybody I’ve talked to they say you pretty much do your crash downs and then you do you run it through like yeah, your measurement. Yeah. Because for the spec I believe for like Netflix is you. You do your metering on the 5.1 crashdown.
René Coronado 30:18
Yeah.
Glenn Eanes 30:18
And that’s what’s required.
René Coronado 30:19
And the Dolby encoders will auto do the 5.1, like you don’t have any additional routing, it’ll just do it
Korey Pereira 30:26
and they have tech built in, then it won’t actually clip. Yeah, so it kind of makes sure it doesn’t clip, you measure the crashdown if you need to adjust that you can, um, I know like new Gen makes the LM Correct as a tool. If you don’t necessarily have time to go back. You can adjust your crash downs a little bit. Then as far as ATMOS spec, I mean, it’s just like anything else. You set your room to the right level, you mix it to where it sounds good. You assume it’s right. I think definitely Netflix. There’s a little bit of latitude at least on the Atmos mix that yeah, if you listen to it in a room and it sounds good and everybody’s happy then you’re okay.
René Coronado 30:58
Yeah, the real mind bending part is the stems.
Glenn Eanes 31:01
Yeah. Especially for TV where you have to deliver dipped and non-dipped. All of that, that becomes a bit problematic
Eats up a lot of your objects just having all those groups. Mm hmm.
René Coronado 31:15
Yeah. Cuz you can take objects and route them around to different places, right. And so that’s kind of how you do it. So well, and actually, I think Netflix, I could be wrong on this. But I think Netflix only requires stems in 5.1 or 7.1 . I don’t think they require ATMOS stems, right?
Glenn Eanes 31:36
The Atmos master file is a deliverable, and then they require a 5.1, and the 7.1
Korey Pereira 31:42
it is probably them getting the ATMOS deliverable and they can drop it into Pro Tools and actually bust out all your objects. So if they needed to go back in and remix it, they actually have the latitude to have your dialogue 7.1 or 7.1.2, your effects and music split out, anything you put in the bed, and then all your objects, they could Go in and redo your work.
Glenn Eanes 32:01
Which is one of the attractive things about the technology for people like Netflix or Amazon, they can do all the crash downs themselves as long as they have an RMU
Nicole Auranger 32:09
So the deliverable is a single file that includes all the audio and all the panning data and basically it’s like the ATMOS like “mix session” almost entirely. All the data, like a shell around the data, shell around the source audio and they can just take that and break it all the way back out.
Glenn Eanes 32:27
It’s actually kind of terrifying at the same time, literally going to do with that new freedom?
René Coronado 32:33
Mess things up but……
Glenn Eanes 32:35
yeah, it’s sometimes it’s it’s tough to watch your mixes air. Oh, yeah. Cuz they do things in the pathway and stuff like that. But with streaming, it’s, it’s a little truer than I used to be on broadcast.
Yeah. So what’s your greatest, let’s go around the table. What’s your greatest triumph slash pitfall of ATMOS so far?
I mean, I think just like, the first time that you get a session up and you start moving things around, you feel like a kid again, like that, that sense really gets you excited to use the format more. And to really try and tell stories with it. It’s kind of like I was telling Korey earlier today, like when I went to see Avatar in 3D. It was a bit different because it was using 3D in a different way then kind of that gimmicky things coming out at you. It’s like looking through a window into a world And to me, that’s what ATMOS feels like when you watch a movie. It pulls you in to the movie more because of the way that things are placed and drape around you. And that’s what’s really exciting.
Nicole Auranger 33:47
Yeah, to me is it’s that full frequency surround. Because you can’t do that in any other format you can’t make you can’t make your mind believe that a real spaceship is flying over your head. If you don’t hear the low end behind you. Atmos gives you the low end behind it for You hang a sub up in the ceiling behind you? That’s what’s cool.
Glenn Eanes 34:03
Yeah. I mean, because we really here with our bodies like our entire bodies as well as our ears. So yeah,
Nicole Auranger 34:09
I think a really cool thing as a writer, knowing the ATMOS was going to be put in I specifically wrote a scene that I knew I could really implement it. So it’s it’s really dark. But there’s a scene. It’s the point of view of this little girl as she’s drowning. So she jumps in the pool and so I’m just imagining the soundscapes and things I can do with ATMOS! It would still sound really cool in surround, but in that most you really get to play with that, the vertical painting Yeah, you can’t do with surround. So that’ll be really fun.
Glenn Eanes 34:40
And movies like like The Aeronauts when you have all the rigging and everything in that balloon above your head. That’s just awesome. Yeah, that was really impressive. Yeah.
Korey Pereira 34:48
So for me I think the biggest moment that kind of pushed me in ATMOS was I went and saw Ready Player One at Brendan theatre while we were in Vegas. We went to Vegas. The show I wanted to see was Ready Player One in ATMOS and Went in like expecting to be excited that
Timothy Muirhead 35:02
Thats what all people go to Vegas for….
Korey Pereira 35:06
yeah I’m that sound nerd. So get there and I watch it in it. It gave me what I wanted, what I thought I was actually going to get out of it. It gave me this other latitude as a mixer that I have other places you can place objects, you have really point source-y ability to pull the music just a little bit off the screen or just a little into the overheads. And it just opens up the sonic space. And then again, going to the Mix Event a couple years ago just sold it for me. I was like this is it. I’m all in.
Nicole Auranger 35:34
As far as pitfalls. Definitely, one thing that happens to me is there’s an optical illusion in the panner where when things are all the way on the ground, they’re not on the ground, the speakers are still above your head. So your mind is telling you that I’m panning things on the ground, but i’m not i’m still above my head. So when I push up, I’m just pushing up. But I’m starting above my head and so there’s there’s just a kind of a visual thing that it took me A minute to get over. And the other thing is your ceiling speakers in your in your in your rear wall speakers are narrower by definition in the space than your than your wall speakers.
Timothy Muirhead 36:10
So not frequency, like actual placement on the walls.
Nicole Auranger 36:13
Yes, yeah, yeah. So you got you got speakers on the walls behind you that are narrower than the speakers on the sidewall, right? You got speakers on the ceiling that are narrower than the speakers on the sidewall. So what happens when you take a sound and you pan it up, is you’re also panning it in. And you have to keep that in your head as you as you use that height. So you know, we were talking to Gary Bourgeois about how he does ATMOS. And a lot of what he was talking about was he likes to push all the music, I think Brian Pennington was talking about someone else that does this as well, take all the music and don’t put any of it in the height. Don’t put any of it in the back. Just put it on the walls and use the height and the back for for sound effects. And that’s kind of the way you can best utilize the width of the space.
Glenn Eanes 36:54
And in terms of the install process any major hints for anyone that’s might be about to go on this journey?
René Coronado 37:02
I mean don’t start drinking…….
Korey Pereira 37:07
I’d say measure twice cut once. Definitely surround speaker placement is something that I made a decision and then had to move it so now you have to make new holes and pull more cable.
Glenn Eanes 37:19
Yeah be aware of how many channels of audio you need to transfer between machines and really like make sure you have the equipment to do that.
yes Because we had to put a massive dual MADI where again to get all the channels back and forth for the theatrical reg.
Korey Pereira 37:37
As far as waiting, I know that’s one nice thing at Soundcrafter, we’re actually going Dante. So again, waiting a couple of years, just a little bit easier,
René Coronado 37:45
Although Dante has got its own limitations, so Dante can’t do 32 bit. Dante doesn’t like going north of 48 K so you know in film mixing context, that’s usually not an issue……… today
Nicole Auranger 38:00
For now,
You know with that said, our studios Dante all the way, over the place. So yeah, but we’re running MADI in the in the actual from the actual box. Yeah so we’ve got the MTRX box as our as our main I/O and we’re running from that to the Dolby RMU and back.
Glenn Eanes 38:17
And for the theatrical RMU is that MADI only? I’m not familiar with the theatrical RMU?.
Nicole Auranger 38:22
I think it is. Yeah, I think it is. Okay. Although I think it was, who knows what it is now. They keep updating. And the other thing is like, it’s the the technical feat of loading something up and playing it back is is still really insane. You’ve got multiple computers going simultaneously all talking to each other sample accurately. And sometimes it doesn’t work. You know, sometimes you do have to still give yourself at least we do a chunk of time before an ATMOS session to make sure that everything is up and flying in the air. Because sometimes you got to reboot things a few times before they move Wake up.
Timothy Muirhead 39:00
Yikes
René Coronado 39:01
Yep.
Glenn Eanes 39:03
Yeah. Yeah. It’s like being your own IT department again, like for the smaller studios or individuals? Yes.
René Coronado 39:12
Even the big studios, though. They’re rebooting.
Glenn Eanes 39:14
Yeah, they’re rebooting, but they have people, they have people to reboot.
René Coronado 39:17
Yeah. But there’s still a room full of people waiting for that to come back up.
Glenn Eanes 39:20
Absolutely. a room full of people as opposed to Yeah, just me! But yes, yeah, definitely the technology is an issue.
Nicole Auranger 39:28
It’s bleeding edge on the high end of it. There’s just a lot is what four simultaneous computers going, you know, and they’re passing hundreds of channels of audio back and forth in real time to the whole thing. And then get into the speakers. Yeah, you know, I just before they go to the speakers,
Glenn Eanes 39:44
it’s an impressive feat. I mean, when it works.
René Coronado 39:46
Yeah. And then that spaceship flies and your like “Yeah”
Glenn Eanes 39:51
yeah. That’s worth it. It’s all worth it.
Is there anything we haven’t covered? Should we talk about actual like session management, like organizing files within the session?
Timothy Muirhead 40:02
Not really put your objects and object tracks, you don’t have to, but it’s still a good workflow.
Korey Pereira 40:06
And something I know Glenn and I have been working on is just like object allocation, like looking at the different effects pre-dubs and deciding how many objects we actually need. How many monitor how many stereo and music, like, how many objects are we actually going to use? Yeah,
Glenn Eanes 40:20
right. And and for most projects, like are you realistically going to use any dialogue as objects? Depending on the project, you may or may not?
Nicole Auranger 40:29
Yeah, and next time comes down to how much you can use a lot of objects without having to move them around. You can just take things and put them in objects and put them up and leave them there. That’s really good for ambiences and also for music. Oh, yeah. You know, you can just put music stems up in objects, put them in place and you’re done right so you don’t have to do spend a lot of time panning. But the things that you do have spend a lot of time panning, it’s worth taking the time to crush them down.
Timothy Muirhead 40:54
We good?
Korey Pereira 40:55
Yeah
Glenn Eanes 40:58
thank you very much for sitting down with us today. This has been a very interesting talk and it’s a giant topic. So we’ve only kind of scratched the surface. So maybe in a year we all get back together and figure out what else we figured out
Nicole Auranger 41:12
what fools we were. Yeah.
René Coronado 41:13
Yeah. This podcast will be in ATMOS in a year?!
Timothy Muirhead 41:19
Yeah. Okay, thanks.
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