I. Méliès
A few Georges Méliès
films were shown last December in a small event facility, Le Studio Hermès in Ginza
where they had a proper projection room equipped with a couple of 35mm film
projectors. The pictures were actually shown via Betacam on the day, but its
quality was quite agreeable and I enjoyed the abundant appeal of 100-year old
special effects by the pioneer.
Méliès himself was one of key characters in the recent well-crafted 3D movie
“Hugo” as many of you already understand. This movie was truly a respectable
masterpiece for me having myself been associated with filmmaking even only
slightly. These two movies related to Méliès illustrate how the motion pictures
evolved incessantly by absorbing then-the-latest technologies.
II. Digital Cinema
85% of total 42,000
cinemas in USA is now digital thanks to VPF (Virtual Print Fee) arrangement. Major
studios used to prepare 6000 film copies of premium summer hit titles for
distribution, but only 500 would suffice nowadays. Looking at the worldwide penetration, the digital cinema
ratio is as high as 69% as of end 2012, therefore “digital” is already a firm
foundation along with the 3D feature, and the industry seems to continue their
effort introducing more technological advancements such as 4k picture (including
laser projectors to follow) and HFR. This is inevitable because the industry is
always concerned about their differentiation against home entertainment. The
departure from 24fps tradition in the digital domain may not be a tough
challenge considering the films are rarely used in the productions today and
the frame-rate accommodation would be relatively easy in video projectors. The
forthcoming “Avatar 2” promises 60fps/4k release to attract some excitement.
Those advancements are on the other hand a kind of specification upgrade rather
than a radical paradigm shift beyond digital cinema. Does the industry steer
their focuses in this direction? Well, it would become obvious for us to
realize that the digital cinema movement was realistically driven by the
economy and efficiency aspects inherent with the digital media, more so than
the picture-quality issues. DCP (Digital Cinema Package) allowed the film
industry to reduce a great amount of time, cost of films and transportation in
generating distribution prints. It also eliminated the process of telecine that
was necessary for the content transfer into video packages and broadcasts. A
substantial improvement in the production efficiency.
The trend in cinemas has shifted from large auditoria to cinema complexes in
the recent years, which enabled them to program all the shows they schedule
simply by presetting on the control panel instead of masculine loading and
unloading of films each time. Each screen tends to be small enough for using 2k
projectors with perceivably sufficient picture quality even though its
specifications are not much different from those of digital home video, which
also helped the progress.
The high hurdle for alternative contents has been eliminated by the digital
format’s nature: About 4 years ago, l’Opera Comique produced the stage of
Bizet’s “Carmen” conducted by John Eliot Gardiner with the original libretto,
and its last performance was shown in 45 digital cinemas throughout France, and
I thought it an excellent example of alternative contents. The same kind of
arrangements is shown in Japan now, and theater owners call it “live viewing”
enabling them to charge more admissions than those of regular movies. We can
understand that the industry has just arrived at a reasonably mature format of
digital just as consumers once decided the direction between film cameras and
digital cameras, and thus the industry is now in the stage for enhancing the
format with some step-up technologies.
III. Sound
Cinema sound kept
evolving roughly every 10 years starting with Dolby Stereo in mid 70’s,
followed by Dolby SR in 80’s. The introduction of digital was late in the movie
industry to wait until 90’s, and at that time some sort of compression coding
was employed each with Dolby Digital, DTS and SDDS. DCI then set forth the
standard of discrete PCM sound in 5.1/7.1 formats. The intermediate step of
Dolby SR before Digital Cinema that continued more than a decade was the
valuable time to complete the soil exchange of the entire movie industry during
which time the productions gradually invested in the digital environment while
cinemas only executed partial changes in their system.
When I posed a philosophical question like “what is the movie in essence”, the
engineers in Dolby almost immediately answered, “it is a story-telling” as
their common understanding. It starts from a script in the director’s hand, and
every single staff or technology is expected to support the story in the
script. The story-telling aspect of
sound mixing had been traditionally rather rigid with center-fixed dialogs, the
modest balance of sound effects or music against dialogs. The surround effects
were required strictly ambient in order not to attract the audience attention
toward elsewhere off-screen, which was a reliable practice to generate a sense
of being there under the limitation of matrix 4-channel surround format without
damaging the story’s quality.
This model of self-maintenance has loosened itself a bit in the digital cinema paradigm
though, as the trend set more freedom to dialogs’ stereo localization, as
typically found in Pixar animation movies, and more dynamic and precise
surround sound along with discrete 5.1 channel penetration. Particularly in
Dolby Surround EX and later formats, they intended to allow out-of-screen
localizations in contrast to the ambience, and this direction is ultimately
pushed further by the latest introduction of Dolby Atmos.
IV. Dolby Atmos
Introduced at the
CinemaCon 2012 in Las Vegas last April, Dolby Atmos technology is probably the
largest revolution in the history of movie sound. In Dolby Atmos system
framework, it saves dialogs, sound effects and music in DCP as 128 audio
objects that are rendered into as many as 64-channel outputs to suit the
theatrical playback system. Hugely different number of channels compared to 5.1
or 7.1 is aimed to achieve the reality of sound sensation unattainable before
in order to further enhance the immersiveness into the story. The workflow of
this complex structure can be efficiently simplified in the production process
thanks to the concept of audio objects.
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| Dolby Atmos System Flow |
Let’s look into the playback section to begin with. Dolby Atmos provides 2 new
features to improve the sensation of sound: One is to add the height with a
group of ceiling top speaks, and the other is the surround imaging that changed
from wall surfaces by speaker arrays to point source of each individual
speaker.
Such nature sound around us as airplane fly-over, bird’s chirping, or thunder
has certain directionality, and there has been limitations in their
reproduction in the film sound. In the days of Lt/Rt matrix, we basically had
on-screen or unlocalized out-of-screen sound (“interior” we used to call it for the latter) and the panning
between their contrasts was the expression of an object’s crude move. Even
later in the time of discrete 5.1, the difference in the timbre and
localization between highly linear screen speakers and surround arrays was so
profound that the solid sound imaging or panning to reveal its tonality was not
practically desirable except for something rather instantaneous. Traditionally,
the theatrical system used to define the surround space in 3 elements of left
side, right side and back walls, but Dolby Atmos regards the listening space as
a cube or a hemisphere and buries as many speakers as possible in it, each
functioning as an individual audio channel whereby the directionality and the
uniformity of timbre can be dramatically improved. The recommended ceiling
speakers do not form a single common channel in array either. They consist 2
lines front to back, lefty and righty, again each functioning individually,
driven by unique, separate amplifier for each.
With the above change, much more colorful effects in the movie sound mixing are
attainable. For example in a jungle, a variety of animals and insects may be
heard from all sorts of directions in clear, crispy tones by giving full
freedom to engineers’ creativity. The quality of panning will be also improved.
It should be noted that the traditional ambient effects are still available in
the new format by rendering them to multiple speaker outputs just as they used
to.
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| Dolby Atmos Speaker Layout |
One more related change in the theater system is the addition of surround
speakers closer to the screen in sidewalls. They help localizing the sound in
the very far end out of the screen and also smoothing the object’s panning
around.
The surround speakers are required to stand up as an individual in their technical
specifications. The frequency response and the power handling are particularly
important when cinemas consider renovating their system for Dolby Atmos
introduction. Still, the ceiling and surround speakers remain physically
smaller than front speakers, and Dolby Atmos wisely redistributes low frequency
elements to the rear sub-woofer(s) and tries to manage the power balance
between the front speakers and the surround speakers by means of plural speaker
rendering for the latter.
Next is the impact in the post-production environment. The most significant
change brought in with Dolby Atmos to the studio engineers is the way to handle
sound elements as objects. Dolby Atmos generates the information of where and
when in the system hemisphere each object is placed as a metadata that is saved
in a package with the object. This workflow is almost homogeneous with that of
ProTools on workstations, and therefore it is like saving the production
procedures themselves into the final mix with Dolby Atmos.
The movie production is not an exception where ProTools has become the
mainstream in use, and the environment offered by Dolby Atmos with the freedom
of specific number of output channels functionally unifies the entire process
of post-production, therefore it is not the complication brought in nor the
same high hurdle is mandated to the system in cinemas identically to dubbing
theaters. When the sound engineer mixes a movie with Dolby Atmos in the dubbing
theater equipped in its maximum playback specifications, a precise 5.1 mix (or
7.1) is automatically generated and saved into DCP in parallel with the Atmos
mix, eliminating the need for repeated, separate works. This single common DCP
package is distributable to variety of digital cinemas with different playback
specifications. The scalability feature of Dolby Atmos here plays an important
role: Even if a cinema cannot afford a few tens of speaker channels, Dolby
Atmos will intelligently take the particular playback environment into account
to render its output in a way to maximize and fit the sound mix. This type of
care about backward compatibility has been a Dolby tradition.
“It was like having a new instrument” quoted a sound engineer regarding Dolby
Atmos. Or it can be said it is like a pallet for drawing new paintings. There
are some useful information in the net about how the studios faced with this
new system and brought it into their production procedures as shown below, for
example:
http://designingsound.org/2012/11/ambiences-with-dolby-atmos/
http://vimeo.com/58805489
V. IOSONO 3D and AURO-3D
A competing format with
Dolby Atmos is IOSONO 3D that was developed by Fraunhofer, a giant organization
known as codec specialist, and this system may be more futuristic in its
concept. Audio objects and rendering through multiple speakers to cover the
spherical space are the common factors with Dolby Atmos, but its approach to
realize the sound localization is based on a totally new theory: Wave Field
Synthesis that captures the sound source through an array of multiple
microphones and reproduces it with the same kind of speaker array around the
space. IOSONO’s unique features are the wide sweet spot and the ability of
localizing the sound at any point within the sphere, for example as close as
next to you. With such significant advantages, they claim it the true 3D
soundscape format.
The drawing shown below illustrates an example of cinema installation with
IOSONO system. According to IOSONO, a typical 1:2 box auditorium would need 9
speakers in front behind the screen and also 9 in the back to yield total 54
speakers to form a single-layer horizontal ring. In addition, recent installations
have 15 to 18 ceiling speaker channels by using triangulated array for the
ceiling zone. For the timbre matching and sufficient power handling of the
speakers in the designs, they cooperate with such speaker manufacturers as
D&B, Fohhn, JBL, Meyer and QSC. For example in the Chinese Theatre in
Hollywood, QSC KW-151 for the screen and K-12 for surround are installed.
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| IOSONO Speaker Layout |
Auro-3D is another new-comer, promoted by Barco, that extends the traditional
5.1 into a 2-layer format: 4-channels excluding Center and LFE are stacked up
on the 5.1 foundation to structure total 9.1 channels, or 10.1 with the ceiling
channel addition. 6.1/7.1 can be extended to 12.1/13.1 in the same manner.
While the traditional surround formats contain only one horizontal line of speaker
array, Auro-3D adds the vertical dimension to realize a 3D soundfield. The
installations and productions are happening since last year, and its
back-compatibility to the traditional layout is quite straightforward.
VI. Gimmick and Essence
Along with the recognition
that the movie is essentially a story-telling, my own contemplation about the
movie is that it is an effort of work to construct a space to experience the
story. This may be only a matter of expressing the same differently, but while
the former is a structural framework to work on the logic and the sentiment,
the latter is a physiological communication with the audience in my opinion. It
may be something like a phase difference between the intellect and the
instinct. It is literally the sense of existing in the screen rather than being
seated in a cinema, or from the viewpoint of movie producers the effort to
drive the audience to such an illusion. When the movie was first shown, the
viewers were horrified with a steam locomotive dashing to them and they tried
to get out, and this is exactly the evidence of a physiological space.
Technologies like large screens, surround sound and 3D imaging all aimed this.
The latest motion simulator falls in the same gender.
What is the decision factor for these technologies to end its life as a gimmick
or to remain steadily as an essential part of moviemaking? As the intellect and
the instinct exist, there are 2 different approaches in the realism of imaging
art. One is to capture the scene with a fixed camera sustainably for a long
period of time just like a fixed-point observation. The other is very cinematic
“montage” technique that edits different cuts to structure a story and drives
it forward. As for the sound, there are no formulas in terms of how it needs to
go along these approaches. Sound effects and music often continue independently
of the transition of scenes. Surround sound is not a form of technology to
recreate the acoustic dimensions of each scene precisely from the opening to
the finale. It goes along with the scenes to a certain extent, but carries its
own montage ups- and-downs to enhance the stage, and it exactly looks like an
established style of “sound designing”.
3D has much longer history than surround, but repeated its gimmicky cycles in
the past for a few times. Personally, I think 3D is exactly the identical
technology in imaging to surround, and thus can perform at least equally to 5.1
especially in digital. On the other hand, I feel the immersive sensation is
often greater in huge 2D screen that entirely occupies the viewing angle. I
also feel a lack of style in 3D except simply dimensional from beginning to
end. These two factors might be its challenge to tackle. In that sense, it is
an interesting subject how 3D would digest the live viewing that I previously
noted.
One answer that I arrived at in this process of thinking is that excellent
contents feed technologies. It is my feeling of reality that potentially a
gimmick technology can trace the road to become an essence if it continues to
enjoy the benefit of being used in excellent contents.
Above include
purely personal observations about the movies and the technologies in the days
of digital, and I hope this serves even slightly the readers for their better
understanding of the subject. I would like to acknowledge and thank Mr. Doug
Greenfield of Dolby Burbank, a long time colleague of mine, and also Mr. Jeff
Levison of IOSONO. Both of them helped me clarifying a few factual aspects of
latest information.
J
About the Author:
Masaaki
Fushiki was born in 1948 and graduated from University of Tokyo majoring French
language and literature. After 5 years of experience in the sales promotion and
product planning in the Overseas Department of TEAC Corporation, he joined
Dolby in 1979 as a liaison licensing staff and initiated promoting the concept
of surround sound for home entertainment in 80’s. He also devoted himself in standardizing
the digital audio format of DVD-video in 90’s. In 1997, he establish the branch
office of Dolby’s international service company in Japan, and formed it into
Dolby Japan K.K. as a legal local entity in 2007. He was the first
representative director of the company until he resigned in 2009.
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