Webinar Replay Audio Processing for A Better Home Movie Experience

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Cindy Zuelsdorf:

Let's get started. Welcome, everybody. I'm so glad you're here today. And hey, M.C. How's your day going?

M.C:

My day is good, busy and busy, but no, very good.

Cindy Zuelsdorf:

Nice. I'm Cindy Zuelsdorf here with M.C and thank you all for being here for Audio Processing for a Better Home Movie Experience, and M.C and I were chatting about this a few weeks back and he had some great things to talk about. And so we're going to get into why the theatrical mix isn't suitable for a home viewing environment, and how cinema and home mix is different from one another, and what you can do to achieve an optimal mix without investing a great deal of time and money, and how other people are doing it right now, out in the field. So over to you, M.C.

M.C:

Okay. Thank you, Cindy. So what we're going to do today is first of all, just a little bit of background. Because cinemas aren't open, it is frustrating the release of movies in a timely manner. I've been dying to see the Bond movie, and it's not going to be released. It got delayed because of COVID in the cinemas and so on. And theatrical release is a massive source of revenue for the studios. And so there is some talk about saying, we need to release this onto online platforms.

M.C:

We have been doing some work because there are people who are delivering content as broadcasters and as online platforms, who have theatrical mixes to contend with. And so I thought it'd be a good idea to have a chat about it and have a webinar explaining the issues and so on. I'm going to keep this largely non-technical. For once I'm going to use a short PowerPoint, but I will spare it down to two or three minutes, and I will try and show a clip of the processing before and after.

M.C:

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start by talking about audio mixing for the cinema, and why is it different or what are the constraints, etc. So you've got to remember, a cinema is a calibrated environment. If you want to present content to a cinema, the cinema sometimes get certified by Dolby or by DTS. And what they do is they look at the acoustics of the cinema, you don't want echoes inside. The speaker layout, the quality of the speaker and so on. So what it is, is that you create a cinema that is suitable for theatrical mix delivery, and then the person who's mixing the audio knows that that's going to be exhibited or presented in a controlled environment. So he has a lot of freedom when it comes to doing the audio mixing, to create a good experience for you. And obviously, if you're watching action movies, the good experience is guns and planes and noises. And also, if you're watching a period drama, then there may be moods and music and dialogue and so on.

M.C:

And the cinema, as I said, acoustically, it's really well-prepared for this sort of delivery. The second thing is the attention span. We go there for a 90 minute experience or a two hour experience if you're Bollywood, a three hour experience, but with a three hour experience, they give you a 10 minute interval. So what it means is your eyes and ears and everything can adjust and can deal with it. Now, what this also means is that because the creative audio guys and the directors want to create a certain impact, there are some standards for delivery, but by and large, it's a bit of a free for all as to how you do it.

M.C:

My favorite story is Christopher Nolan, who, in one of his movies, they put up a billboard outside the theater which says, you may not hear the dialogue and that's intentional, which wouldn't be so good if you're doing Hamlet or something. But anyway, that's a creative license that exists. These guys are billion dollar box office, movie makers so they get what they want generally.

M.C:

Now, when you come into a broadcast environment, first of all, if you look at your living room, it is probably the epitome of a non-acoustic environment. The Telly's shoved in a corner somewhere. The speakers are In the old days, we used to have a nice three inch speaker, but now with the sets getting thinner, the speaker quality is variable, and there is a lot of noise, and we watch TV for a long time. And I'm probably speaking as an old guy who watches TV, as opposed to the kids who watch it on the laptop. So the audio channeling is different. And what the broadcasters have had for a long time is some standards who say, When we deliver audio, we want to have a certain audio level or approach that is suitable for that environment. And we call it program loudness.

M.C:

In program loudness, what you're really saying is that the average level of audio has to meet a certain amount. So you can have loud bits, you can have quiet bits, but in a program, the average must always be consistent. Again, we won't go into too much detail. I'm talking about these concepts because later on, I'm going to talk about what the challenge is as you go from one environment to other. The other key thing with program loudness is there are broadly speaking, two standards, the EBU, the Europeans, and the ATSE 85, the Americans.

M.C:

And then there are variations of that adopted by all other countries, but there are two numbers. The average for the EBU level's minus 23, the average for the US is minus 24. Then there are true peak levels that really are designed so that you don't drive your peaks into distortion, and they could be minus one, minus two, minus three. The good news or the bad news is even with these small numbers, every individual broadcaster has their own flavor of this. So when you're delivering content, it's important to meet these standards and requirements. And what this means is you're going to c

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