Sounds good

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Sounds good --

Fri, 16 Jan 2015 11:31

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The audio industry has witnessed major innovative and creative changes in the past few years. From sound post for film, television, video games or new media to the preservation, restoration and archiving of media assets and full digital content services, industry leaders have come up with a combination of award-winning technology and just plain simple ideas to overcome all the challenges.

For millions of years, sound was a natural phenomenon; only existing in the moment and time it was produced. Then came the development of technology, allowing the recording and reproduction of those audible moments we could hear around us and hence the development of radio, cinema and television.

There is a saying that sound is half the picture or 70% of what you see . Audio is undoubtedly most important in television and film production but, being human we decided to abuse the very technology we created and soon excessive and inexpedient use of compression, limiting and maximisation caused audio to suffer considerably. The greed of a few, whose desire it was to pinch more and more of the spectrum, led to a war in the television industry resulting in a bold effort to bolster audience comfort, particularly during commercial breaks.

Over the past year or two, new broadcast standards have been introduced inciting the said loudness wars and after heavy battle, we are finally at peace and with new equipment that allows for compliance with these standards production, post and broadcast professionals now have a valuable and efficient set of tools in the ongoing fight against the said loudness.

With these new standards, cross-genre programme material can finally co-exist, and volume knobs and remote buttons can expect a longer life, while audiences will get a far more pleasant listening experience.

Changing times

The audio post-production market has changed quite dramatically over the past five to eight years. Overall there are fewer productions and budgets have been tightened as a result of the world economic decline . There has certainly been a decline in independent post facilities; those without their own production arms rely solely on third party product to keep their doors open. Some of the major studios that have sound facilities have an advantage over these independent post facilities. They support their own needs and requirements creating creative content for their studio s releases.

In 2014 Warner Brother Post-Production Services and Warner Brothers Game Audio department launched the world s first-ever virtual production stage. The new state of-the-art facility offers a 250 square-metre space with Optitrak motion capture facilities and audio capability to enable the actors voice performances to be recorded for post live, thus eliminating the need to lay in audio tracks later. The majority of production in the new facility is for the games market.

New console technology and increasing resources in PCs have made significant amounts of processing power and memory available to games and other interactive applications and thus an upsurge in audio production in the gaming industry.

Previous trends in game audio revolved around squeezing audio solutions into low memory and designing effects with minimised processor usage.

In contrast, current trends arise due to the vast flexibility available for interactive audio given by high processing power and more memory. While interactive audio was dominantly the domain of games, wider availability of high-level audio application programming interfaces (APIs) have opened up more possibilities for research, training and educational applications. The use of HD formats and widespread acceptance of multichannel audio has led to 5.1 and 7.1 channels becoming a standard specification on many computer games and developers are even looking to new possibilities including the potential application of ambisonics in games. The full-sphere surround sound technique was developed back in the 1970 s but it is only now that off-the-shelf hardware is close to allowing its possible use in gaming.

Emerging technology trends

Audio coding has emerged as a critical technology in numerous audio applications. In particular, it is a key component of mobile multimedia applications in the consumer market including wireless audio broadcast, Internet radio and streaming music, music downloads, storage and playback, mobile audio recording and Internet-based teleconferencing, on a variety of platforms including digital audio broadcast radio receivers, portable music players, mobile phones and personal computers.

The frontiers of compression have been pushed further, allowing carriage of full- bandwidth signals at very low bit rates to the point where recent coding systems are considered appropriate for some broadcasting applications, particularly relatively expensive wireless communication channels such as satellite or cellular channels.

In television and broadcast, there is considerable research activity exploring audio presentation that is more immersive than the pervasive consumer 5.1 channel audio systems. The industry has applied the label of 3D Audio to such explorations, since the common thread is the use of many loudspeakers positioned around, above and below the listener.

It s a big story, so big that the European Broadcast Union (EBU) has founded a work group for 3D audio or Immersive Audio and the MPEG Committee has begun work on immersive sound coding.

In the cinema world, Dolby Laboratories Atmos is the name of a surround sound technology taking immersive audio into the silver screen theatre at a whole new level. Atmos technology allows for an unlimited number of audio tracks in theatres for optimal, dynamic rendering to loudspeakers based on theatre capabilities.

Atmos enables the audio enginee

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