Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487666
60 W I N T E R 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y My old friend, David Smith at Sony Classical in New York, said the best sample rate conversion that we have today is a piece of wire. You come out at one sample rate, and you go in at another sample rate, and that the piece of wire is the converter, and that works. It's not that big of a deal to work with sample rate conversions or stick with higher sample rates. A few re-recording mixers have actually agreed to go ahead and print, make their music master at a high sample rate, and then print master back to 48 kHz. It's still a controversial subject. Have you mixed for any of the streamers other than Hulu? I've worked on projects that have gone to streaming, but I haven't had to deal with their standards. We are dealing with it when we do Atmos music mixes. We're dealing with Apple and Dolby, the -18 LUFS and all that stuff that everybody deals with. Have you had to change your workflow for mixing in Atmos? Yes, my feeling is that you need to make a mix that's going to be fairly format-compatible. And what we found is when you mixed initially in Atmos, that the down-mixes that are generated automatically are not so compatible. They're not as good as you'd like them to be when you get to 7.1, 5.1, or stereo. You kind of go, "Oh, I'm going to go back and redo that," and often you don't have the time. What I do first is my 5.1, which is kind of a nice middle ground. A good 5.1 mix can be reduced to stereo very effectively and sound great. The balances can hold. For Atmos, what do you find yourself putting in the overheads? Well, for orchestras, it's ambient material primarily. We put height mics up. We sometimes use the square technique over the orchestra. Sometimes we put sets of mics a little further out into the hall and another pair over the orchestra. It depends on the ensemble and the room. And of course, we have reverb settings which blend some of that material into the front, and the surrounds into the tops as well. For me, it has to be kind of a seamless approach. The sides, tops, and rears have to all kind of work together. We'll use objects to move around a little bit sometimes. If we have synths, we might use objects to float it in the room and through different speakers. I know a lot of dubbing mixers like to use objects to widen the front speakers. So, you get a 9.1 front, and a lot of our tops are four channels. A lot of our deliveries to people actually are 7.1 plus two stereo tops because we know they're going to make those into objects. Most of the dubbing mixers I've talked to say that works great for them. I'd say our delivery probably is 80% bed material, with the optional top objects and wide front objects. And then another 20% is specific objects that we mix, that we intend to hand over to them to position and move based on what we've done in our mix down. Have you listened to any of the translations from Dolby Atmos to binaural for Apple Music delivery? We listen, and we actually go into the renderer and create our own settings that get [embedded into the file] because the default settings are, for our material, often not very complementary. Would you recommend that people listen to the stereo mix rather than the binaural mix? Absolutely. We try to always deliver a master that we're happy with. But, down the road, you can't determine what every single person is going to hear. And, certainly with Dolby Atmos, when you do your basic mix pre- render and then you listen to post-render, it's a different animal. It's not the same. Shawn Murphy