Mixing Dolby Atmos For TV/Film

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Hi, everyone. [00:00:06] Speaker B: I'm Tom McAndrew with Dolby content relations team. We really appreciate you all being here. This is exciting. We're going to talk with this esteemed panel about sound design for television film. I'm going to do a little button at the end to talk about podcasts and audiobooks. Like Mark teased, we had an amazing event last night at Apogee Studio with the SoCal Podfest organization, and it was a great turnout and it's really exciting working with indie podcasters and getting them talking about their world. But primarily we're here to talk about film and tv, and I want to thank both Allen Larson, Doug Mountain and Scott Hirschen all for being here. When I was preparing for this panel, I was reading down their IMDb credits and it was literally all the films and shows that they worked on over the years. You guys are absolute rock stars. I'm thrilled to be on stage with you. So thank you. So, one by one, if each of you would just share a little bit about your background and just what led you to your current role in kind of your specialty and what you do in the world of sound design and mixing. You want to kick it on? [00:01:14] Speaker C: Want me to start? [00:01:15] Speaker D: Yeah, go ahead. [00:01:16] Speaker C: Well, my secret is I failed upward and basically I was a failed trumpet player, and then I became a failed record mixer. And because I played trumpet and I was a classical musician, and I don't know, if you don't play guitar in a rock band and use that as a way to meet girls, you probably shouldn't be mixing their songs. And somehow or other, at the end of my career, I met a guy named Hans and that worked out. That was in 1994. It's been 30 years. And since then I've done 300 movies, 50 major video games, and I'm still active in the record business, I get to mix a lot of stuff that's orchestrally oriented, like Moby and dead mouse and stuff like that. So it's a lot of fun. But basically because I had a lot of tracts in the record industry, especially in the early days of the first wave of dance records and stuff, I was doing a ton of that in the early eighties, and I had a lot of chops in sort of making things sound aggressive. And film music was at that moment in time, 1994, 95, 96, really making more of a move, not away from orchestral, but to hybrid. And I just happened to be the right guy in the right place at the right time. And so I got very fortunate. So the first movie I ever did was speed. It won the Academy Award for best sound mixing. Music mixers. Don't get one. Just any of you in the academy, by the way. I would have had seven because I've had seven films that I've done for best sound mixing and blah, blah, blah. I've done a lot of great movies. Gladiators, seven Chris Nolan movies, six pirate movies, two dune movies, so on and so forth. And it's been a great run. And I want to thank the greatest pro tools operator in the world, Larry Ma, who is here to visit, who I would never walk into a scoring stage without. [00:03:21] Speaker B: That's it, Doug. Take it away. [00:03:24] Speaker D: I'm Doug Mountain. I'm a supervising sound editor and re recording mixer for Warner Brothers. I'm now in charge of mixing some of your favorite old movies. I make atmos from everything from mono movies from the fifties all the way up to some of the ten polls of the last ten years. I do approximately like 20 films a year. I started out as an engineer in this business, heavily involved with the academy and the Grammys for many, many years. And I, a few years back, probably 15 years back, I decided to shift gears and go into editing and became a senior dialogue editor, working on such shows as Walking Dead and community and countless feature films. My specialty was cleanup, and that kind of led into restoration, which led into atmos up mixing. So I mix right now. I mix atmos five days a week. [00:04:25] Speaker B: Start out as a musician. [00:04:27] Speaker A: No, no. All right. [00:04:29] Speaker B: You're the one. [00:04:29] Speaker D: Piano lessons was as far as I got. [00:04:31] Speaker A: Garcia, I'm Scott. I started off as a musician. I was a guitar player, but a frustrated synths player. So it got to the point where it was all about pedals and any way to manipulate sound. I soon realized I became a tone junkie. Any way to start creating any kinds of sounds I could. Went to Berkeley and Boston, came out, started programming synths for, like, Mike Blang and a bunch of studio players. Then somewhere along the line, it became more fun to create lasers. So everything from mos and Jupiter sixes to whatever I got, my hat is on, which led to honeyshots, kids to american beauty to. I've done like over 100 movies. Then I got into, in addition to my movies, games. Last couple of movies, by the way, have been Guillermo to throws Pinocchio and Nightcrawler and Team America, et cetera, et cetera. And the games I enjoy. I love technology. Like I said, I'm a tone junkie. I like to bang two things together, figure out if I could put an EQ pitch it down, manipulate in some way that creates an emotion. To me, pop music was fine, but I'd hear orchestral music and I kind of see colors and I see images. So to me, sound is a visual experience as much as it is audio. And then I just thought it was really cool how I can take dissonant harmonics to create tension and ways that made me feel a emotion based on the sounds I was hearing. So that led me into sound design. And to this day, I'm still. I feel like just scratch the surface and there's so much to explore on the opportunities to just make people feel things and tell stories. [00:06:26] Speaker B: And you worked on both of the last of us games also, correct. [00:06:30] Speaker A: I did the last of us. Well, you know, it's great because ultimately it's about either telling a story or creating an experience, and both do that. Games and music, I mean, movies. So the whole point of a guess is you feel something. Do you emotionally, just. You're right there. I gotcha. Whether it's kid stuff, I did tons of animation from. Oh, goodness, Shrek. [00:06:55] Speaker C: I did that. [00:06:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we've done a lot of the movies. Gladiator, it's small world, but again, you start making sounds and you see a little giggle and you're like, okay, I've got that. Or you make something so awe inspiring. This is a story, but it's really an experience. A lot of video games do that. A lot of movies sometimes would do that. So the things to make you go, wow, a Pacific rim, I did. So we wanted something big, and, you know, Guillermo said, 25 story creature. I want to feel that. Make that happen. [00:07:30] Speaker B: And you mentioned emotion. And the reason I brought up the video game was I stink at video games. Once we would be out a joystick and two buttons, dear God help me. But, you know, games like that that really involve you in the storytelling. You genuinely feel attached to the characters when you're actually getting emotionally involved. [00:07:45] Speaker A: Absolutely. And you can even go as far as. Cause I did a lot of VR. And that's interesting because now we talk about atmos against a flat plane. Now you start talking about a spherical visual environment with spherical audio information that opens up a whole bunch of fascinating possibilities. [00:08:04] Speaker B: So let's talk actually about how you all started out in Atlas. When, you know, when Dolby Atlas first came out, Brave was the first Dolby Atlas movie from Pixar. And we joked that back then everything had to have rainstorms and helicopters because, oh, it's a gimmick. And we're working with the new toy and we're flying stuff around the ceiling plane. How did you start out in Atlas? And then how kind of did you evolve in terms of going, oh, this is what the technology can do, and this is how we can help with storytelling. Give us some examples about how your personal evolution. [00:08:35] Speaker D: I can address that. [00:08:36] Speaker B: Great. [00:08:37] Speaker D: So the pandemic came along. I stuck it home. I had seven, one in my living room, and I added overheads, and I dropped my workstation in the middle of the room, and I started playing, and I started to play with content. And then I started to show some of that content to people at the studios. And they were like, wow, this is great. Try this way. And eventually they just started handing me movie after movie after movie to take to the next level, and we came to some very basic understanding about how to make atmos work for film and television. You want me to go over them? Okay. Breaks down to this. It's three basic layers, dialogue, music, and effects. Basically, the story is told by the actors through dialogue. The music tells you how to feel about that scene or that emotion, and the effects basically tell you where you are and what it goes. It's the stage to which the story is being told, and you kind of have to keep that in mind, especially if you're, the majority of what's going on is up on the screen. We found that if you. And this was kind of an early accidental thing. We discovered that if you take atmos or if you take music and it was mixed in LCR or whatever it was, and you wrap it around into the room a bit, it has a greater emotional impact on the story being told. It has a greater emotional impact for the viewer. And we're like, ooh, this gives you more feels right. So. But Alan can kind of expound on that a little more. [00:10:15] Speaker C: Sure. [00:10:16] Speaker D: And then Scott can tell us more about effects and bgs and all the. [00:10:23] Speaker C: So for me, actually, the first time I really paid any attention to atmos is I went, when I have a day off, I go to movies by myself. I love it. I love going in the afternoon. There's no one there. I sit myself in the sweet spot, and I just experience it. And I went to see PI, and it was the first time I had heard a music score mixed in atmos, which it actually wasn't. It was mixed into stems, and then the stems were applied to atmos by Ron Bartlett, who's a good friend of mine, and it just rocked my socks off. I'm like, this is it. This is what's going to happen. Next, and fast forward many years. And the first thing I sort of, the first call I got to do, I forgot the time. But we had Lion King and I had Gemini man, and they both wanted me to mix it, native atmos. So here's the deal with music. A lot of times, the dubbing stage would prefer that you just do a bed, a five one bed or a seven one bed, and then they can pick and choose where to put it. Now, that's risky, because if you have someone that's not a musical cat, then you don't know how things are going to end up. And believe me, I have been in some rooms where that hasn't gone so well. But when you're working with a guy like Ron Bartlett and you're doing dune, you're in pretty good hands. So I was very comfortable with that. But there are times when I'm asked to mix a native atmos mix, like on Gemini Man, Lion King and stuff, and you just develop your technique. And I actually have two techniques. I do one that is from my film applications, which, of course, now doesn't mean anything, because, as I just found out, that the thing that was the limitation is no longer there, but where I didn't really use objects because I knew that if I tied up a bunch of objects, then they weren't available for dialogue or effects, and I didn't want to do that. So it was just the bed and a quad height, and I just did a very, very simple. My philosophy is that when it's playing with dialogue and effects, the music does not want to be all over the place because you lose your focus. So it might be the orchestral microphones at the top, or it might be a choir, or it might be a synth pad or something like that, but it's very simple and very straightforward. Now, when I mix records or I'm doing a soundtrack album of the same music, this is all bets are off. And I actually use a dubbing layout, which basically gives me levels of height, and I can just pitch. I can go from one to the next to the next. Oh, the woodwinds. Let me hear what they sound like up there. Oh, that sounds pretty good. Okay, well, then I'll put them up there. And, like, when you listen to that, which, I'm sorry, that wasn't the most exciting piece, but. But I really, you know, my goal is not to have you hear the heights. My goal is not to have you hear the wides. My goal is to create an experience for you that is just an experience, and that is full, but you don't even know it until you turn it off. And that's when you're going to really know it. So I've evolved and I keep evolving. I pretty much do all my soundtrack albums through an Atmos shell now so that I can always go to Atmos if I want to, even if they're only asking for stereo. And I still just respect, you know, for me, my job is to serve the needs of the film. So if the dubbing mixer that's gonna do music on the stage wants, you know, just bed stems, that's what I'm gonna give them. If they want Atmos, I'll give them that. A lot of times now they're happy with, like, 714, where I'm just really doing the orchestral and live elements at the heights. And so I do that quite a bit now. [00:13:53] Speaker B: So, Scott, tell us a little bit about your evolution. About Pinocchio is such a great example because it's pure sound design. There's no production dialogue. It is purely post produced. And it's a great playground, essentially. [00:14:09] Speaker A: There's two contrasts involved. So when Dolby Atmos first came out, we were doing a movie called Pacific Rim, and we thought, this movie is literally the demo for. For atmos because we have height, we have these giant things standing up, and you should go, whoop, up there. So what we found, because anytime you get a tool, you figure out how to best use your tool. What does it do? Well, what you think it's going to do, what doesn't maybe do that as well? Maybe just something else. The two things that I noticed with Dolby Atmos, the first thing is clarity when we have, because I do a lot of visual effect shows and there's, you know, there's a lot of sound effects, a lot of music, and, oh, yeah, dialogue, and we're duking it out. So the thing, what atmos does, it opens everything up. It's not where the music and the effects are just beating the crap out of each other out of the left and right speaker. So now all of a sudden, you. [00:15:08] Speaker C: Gives you back depth. [00:15:09] Speaker A: Absolutely. The transducers can only do so much movement of complex waveforms, especially in theater, because they're bigger. So it just opens things up. And that's one of the things we noticed was we did the mix. You said, this sounds good. We went to the seven one, went to five one. We're like, oh, wow, that's very telling because some ways the mix felt very normal, but clear, open and spatial. So that's the first thing I noticed that Atmos gives you, it just gives you clarity, gives you openness for the mix. Interestingly enough, what I've noticed, and you can tell me, your side is that. And your side is that in the big action scenes, the big music's going and sound effects going and different lines of dialogue are going. It's actually not as detailed as you think. Meaning the panning. Why? Because you've got hundreds of objects moving around now. It creates spatialness open. But what we found was in the quiet sections. So, like, I was like, oh, big atmos movie. No, quiet atmos movie. We got to the point where it's quiet and you hear every little nuance, and now all of a sudden, the room's able to breathe a little more. Now, all of a sudden, you used to hear things and you things over there. And it's always challenging because the movie's on the screen, so you don't want to distract the audience from doing one of these things. Yeah. You know, and it's just because you sit there. I get pulled out of the movies when I start hearing something that's not blended correctly. Moving around. Now, one of the things that I like to do is I actually, sometimes there are reverbs that are atmos based reverbs for what I do. I don't like it. What I do is have anywhere from three to four reverbs in different places in the room so I can move things because I like things longer in the back, get it off the screen. Boom. And just let it float back. Anything that creates from what I do, a giant seven one or atmos reverb, it stays in that environment, which I would think would be great for music, but sound effects would be horrible for. [00:17:33] Speaker C: There'S technical reasons, too, where that millibit is not Harley. In other words, if the reverb, if every position of the reverb isn't the same exact algorithm. So you stick something in the center and it just goes, right? Yeah. If you have backbone a little bit different, a little bit longer, change the early reflection time and stuff like that, you start getting this modulation between them that the ear just hears a space. So you can create a much more deep reverb using stereo. Like, I do it exactly the same. I have a stereo front. The stereo mid is stereo rear. But I feed it off of a seven one feed. Correct. So that all the orchestra is in its appropriate place, unless I don't want it to be, and then I fuck it up, which is my prerogative, because no one knows what I'm doing anyway. But I've discovered that that's just a more interesting sound. Unless you're doing a synth pad or something where it doesn't really matter, where there's nothing, where imaging is not part of it. It's just size and length. [00:18:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:31] Speaker C: So I agree. And I agree with everything you're saying. Oh, thank you. [00:18:35] Speaker A: And one great thing is sound design and music. Tango. The point is, my foley, or what I call it, my sound effects, they're organic. They create reality on the screen. If I take that out now, we're swimming music's. And we're almost in, like, a dream state. So different techniques. But one of the things I do, because I do a lot of creatures. Big ra right in the front, I want to sustain it without making it louder. So if I put it in multiple speakers and it floats back, it's actually lasting a lot longer. But new music and dialogue are hit in the front. Now, all of a sudden, we have this tango. So goes, da ba ba ba ba, in the front. Now, all of a sudden, there's room for everything because we're in a spatial area. And then, obviously, when it reverbs out the high end roles and it has that nice little sound to it. Cause it's really a puzzle fitting it all together. And I'll say one thing that we did, I did recently, we were talking about Pinocchio. It was the first time the mix was designed. I mean, we always design. But what I'm saying is, as a story point, the movie figuillermo's concept was a puppet movie. It starts in mono. The whole opening is mono. And then it starts opening in stereo. And once, basically, Pinocchio starts becoming alive, it opens up and we go full atmos. And the movie, and it grows and it builds. And then everybody. Excuse me, if you haven't seen the movie, everybody dies. And we go right back to mono. So the movie evolves spatially and ends spatially as a story point. I thought that was pretty cool. That was the first time I've done that. [00:20:29] Speaker C: Something similar to that on traffic, where all of the dialogue and affects Romano. And the music was very sparse. When it would come in, it would come in everywhere and then disappear. And you're back in mono. [00:20:39] Speaker A: What's great about this is that we're using atmos not as a technical tool, but as an emotional tool. [00:20:48] Speaker C: Just to go on your fact, there's a choreography that happens on a dub stage. And I was so glad Chris Jenkins and Ron invited me to actually be the dubbing mixer on a movie a long time ago, Preacher's wife. And until I did that, I didn't really understand it, but there's as much value to me pulling down something to allow sound effects to come through and then finding my way back up and let sound effects come back. And this becomes this natural choreography that starts happening. And before you know it, you have two things that are happening. The music's much more exciting, and it doesn't even have to be as loud. [00:21:23] Speaker A: No, exactly. [00:21:24] Speaker C: You know, atmos is a great. The volume of movies has come down, unless I'm mistaken. I believe that the. You know. Cause I did a lot of Burkheimer movies, so. Yeah, but the volume is a little bit less harsh and painful now than it used to be, and. But yet we have more depth and more excitement and, you know, good mixing. But it's also the environment, the Atmos environment. [00:21:49] Speaker B: That's a great point you made about storytelling and actually using sound to help tell the story. Like the beginning of Pinocchio and the transition from mono to going wide. When I talk to podcasters, we talk about it's a pure audio medium. The sooner you can engage sound as a device to help with the storytelling, you get sound involved actually in the writing phase, and that really helps with the overall quality of the project. And I'm glad to hear that that was part of your experience with Pinocchio as well. [00:22:16] Speaker C: Well, great music is. Music is storytelling, even at all levels, maybe not in the two thousands, because it sort of become a sort of less involved thing. But, you know, if you listen back to the stuff that clear mountain does, where he'll be here later, and it's all about storytelling and music for film. I mean, that's why I love it, because dialogue is my lead vocal. So I just make sure that I keep out of the way of my lead vocal. And I love being part of that. The dance that happens with that. When a dub is good and I watch the movie, I'm like, me up there. [00:22:59] Speaker D: So in the dialogue world, one of the things that we've kind of learned with Atmos is it's primarily, you leave it up on the screen, but if you shape the reverb to match the scene and what he's laid out, or I. You can actually make it feel, put the listener or the viewer more into the moment. So it helps to kind of sell the location, especially if it's scripted and it's been shot over a series of time, over different takes and different angles. Once that dialogue is smoothed out. If you put that into the scene, the shot itself or that set with an appropriate shaped reverb that matches it, then you can turn around and you can take things like Foley and put and copy that reverb down and use like a full atmos, like liquidsonics, cinematic rooms, or some of the exponential stratus 3d. Once you kind of shape that and you can shape the reverbs at that point of how much you want to kind of remain in the room. But if you just give it a little in the overhead and a little and it's decaying quickly into the back, but it helps to support what they're doing because it feels more natural into the space that you're viewing. Traditionally. We used to. There's been some evolution. Originally, Reverb was added to kind of help smooth out bumpy dialogue and backgrounds were put underneath to help you take out the bump of all the shifting room tone that was happening in the dialogue as well as adding a fair amount of noise reduction. But if you take that, once you've done that sort of basic dialogue processing and then you turn around and you put a nice little 714 or 916 reverb on it but keep it more front heavy, then you end up with a very convincing moment that once the music supports it and the backgrounds tell you where you are, you can't. And then the other thing we found, too, with a lot of going back and readdressing some of these classic movies is you can go in and then extract from what used to be a very sort of limited front heavy mix and kind of start to pull stuff out into the room. I use a lot of isotope rx to isolate sound elements. Dog barks, car horns, crickets. And you can start to work those things into the room and wrap them around so it feels more natural than, you know, supported with, you know, some, you know, more three dimensional backgrounds, you can really sell the moment. And I found that that's. That approach works best whether it's a new movie or it's an old movie. [00:25:41] Speaker A: Right. [00:25:41] Speaker D: You can use atmos to sell the moment that this scene is supposed to be taking place. [00:25:47] Speaker A: And one thing I want to add to this as well. I did a movie called Book of Life with Jorge Gutierrez and we did something really fun. I love crowds. So since the beginning of my career, I kind of broke the rules because I didn't know what the right way to do it. I got bored on the 4 July, grabbed a bunch of people outside and I ran them around because I wanted to create Vietnam with actors. So in Book of life, I actually rented a bullring in New Mexico and brought 100 people in. 50 there, 50 there. Put mics everywhere. I had mics in the tunnels. I had all these different mics because we had to do a sing along, chants and crowd reactions to Manolo. And we recorded it, and it was wonderful. I'll be honest. I played it for Jorge. He's like, that's a bull ring. That's literally a bull ring. No reverb. Didn't have to put any reverb. I love recording spaces. And we put an atmos, and it was great. We just put, okay, these mics going to go here, these mics go there. Boom, dead on. And of course, we kept moving the people. So 50 here, and we kept moving them, and we spent 12 hours. I was conducting them. I was a crazy person in the middle of a bullring in Tijuana. And it was great. So you had like, there's my sides, and I'm thinking this way, okay, there's my center. And I just did it. We went over and dubbed it old music trick gets much small orchestra, and you make them bigger. And so I did that, and it was great. I didn't have to add any reverb. Did little, just a little eq. And to be honest, the easiest thing, the recording took a long time. Once I edited in, sunk it all up, it just played. And I love when they don't have to use reverb. American beauty was that way. Pinocchio. Well, Pinocchio's different, but I like it where I love recording in space to be able to. It's the best reverb you can buy. [00:27:39] Speaker B: You know, so you mentioned earlier talking about, you know, the big action scenes, you know, that's kind of the obvious use case, but also the smaller, you know, the dialogue scenes, the more intimate moments. When, when I talk to new creators about working in Dolby Atmos, and they say, well, Atmos is for this, but not for that. And it's like, no, Atmos is for everything. And an example I always use is a chef stable on Netflix Foodie documentary series. Why do you need Dolby Atmos for that? [00:28:02] Speaker C: I. [00:28:02] Speaker B: But there are such lovely moments in that show, like a scene. Mashima Bailey, chef Bailey is out on a shrimp boat. And there's only a few sonic design elements. A little bit of water lapping, some birds, some cicadas, a little breeze, only a few sound design ambiences, but they're placed in three dimensional space. You are now on the boat with her, that's not time consuming, that's not expensive, but it's still a really impactful moment. And I'm just going to go ahead now and grab the third rail and say, tell me a little bit about your thoughts about time and expense of Dolby Atmos versus old school 5.1. How do you think that has evolved and what kind of budgets and costs and time do you think it takes? [00:28:40] Speaker A: I'll add that, but I want to add one special thing. I was going to say, I've learned most of my stuff from this guy and these guys because whether it's a decatry, whether how the recording styles, how they record, what are they thinking when they record, you know, all these things. I'm a mixed magazine like everybody else. I'm going, what a great idea. Maybe I could take that concept. But, you know, drums or guns, all of it. [00:29:11] Speaker C: Array specifically for atmos now. So that along with my decu tree, there's a eleven mic atmosphere. [00:29:19] Speaker A: So it was like a ceiling mic setup. [00:29:20] Speaker C: It's more, believe me, it's crazy. It's cost me more money than I've ever spent on any one thing in this industry. [00:29:27] Speaker A: But see, this is, even though he's doing score, I'm doing sound effects. There's so much to learn from both of us. Like, oh, how'd you do that? Oh, that's a great idea. You know, so I think that's where I've always learned. To me, they used to say that the definition of music is organized noise. So I feel I'm doing music. I feel we're all doing music. I feel we're all using the tools to be able to like a propeller story. But to your Azerbaijan, I think. I mean. Cause I'm in the. I'm in the. I'm the caboose of the train. I'm the very last thing. So we get beaten up a lot. Well, you finish before we do, though. Like a couple days before. No. [00:30:14] Speaker C: Okay. A couple of days before. [00:30:17] Speaker A: They don't is days. It is like we go in and rule one's done. [00:30:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:30:21] Speaker A: And we do reel one. Reel two is not done yet. [00:30:23] Speaker C: Music wise. Music wise, yeah. And sometimes we have to change the order of our reels because they're not done on reel three. So we're gonna go to reel four. So just as I finish mixing reel three, I get a phone call, hey, we're not going to reel three. We're gonna go to reel four. And I'm like, okay, then you need to invent 20 more hours to mix it in, because it is not mixed. [00:30:42] Speaker A: I'd say essentially, Atmos has sort of become a standard. And there's one thing that nobody's talked about here so far with Atmos, and I'll say conceptually, but it does work, is the scalability. So now, instead of us having an SD's, a DT's, a Dolby, now all of a sudden we have a scalability that makes it much easier to be able to go from atmos to 7.1 to 5.1. I would still like to recommend to all the Dolby people. Stems haven't really been thought out correctly in Dolby. I mean, yes, you basically do beds and you can put the beds in there, but we figured a workaround. But speed wise, it could be faster if there were other options available, potentially. [00:31:40] Speaker C: So to me, it's almost no expense edition because it's baked in already. So whenever I work now, I'm working in an Atmos template, and if I'm not mixing an Atmos well, I don't have to listen to the heights and I don't even have to go through the renderer, but I can still be in my template. And that way, if they ever want an atmos, it's available to do. And with the recording, I'm always recording an Atmos immersive array. So all of this is part of what I do every single day. So all the learning curve is increasing all the time. Things change. But I'm out of kindergarten, I'm in middle school, and now I know to bring my books home, and I know to have my. So I know how to start, and it's so that I can't say too long. I need another 14 days to mix atmos. You know, I don't want to say that. Sometimes I do, but if it didn't start, and it used to be, if it didn't start at Atmos, then it was a big deal. But now, even if I'm not starting at Atmos and talking specifically about soundtracks, now, it's just easy to do it. You know, I have this thing that's happening. Let me just finish this point. I have this thing that's happening right now. It's. I'm mixing a world upon Zimmer tour tv show, right? And I'm working off of the mix that they did because I just don't have time to remix the whole thing. And they did it in stereo. So I, you know, I reached out, I said, did you. Did you want this in atmos. Oh, no, I want it in Dolby. I'm like, okay, well, Dolby what? And she goes, oh, Dolby Atmos. Okay. So I have to build it, which, you know, it's going to take a little time, but once I build it, it's done. Once I build it, it's built. So I have templates that I work with. I have my scoring atmos template. I have my soundtrack atmos template. I have my jazz atmos template. I have my EDM atmos template. Not really, but I will. The first time I get asked to do an EDM album in this century, because I haven't done one since last century. [00:33:47] Speaker A: Question I had for you was, does it take you longer to mix in atmos than seven one? [00:33:53] Speaker C: No, it doesn't really. It's all I do. For me, mixing is a weird process because I work really, really fast, and then I put it away and I do something else, and then I come back to it and I sit there and I go like this. So the beard stroking part of it is just more fun, you know, and. But it doesn't really take me any longer anymore. I mean, it did at first when I was learning how to use it, but now I sort of committed to what I want my sound to be in atmos. [00:34:23] Speaker A: So I find the same thing. That's why I was asking you that when you ask him about the cost of Atmos, everything's atmos now. It's just. It's part of it. So it's not. I don't think it takes a whole lot longer because versioning is a different process, having to create all the many. The tv version, the theatrical version, the airline version, you know, that is a thing. [00:34:48] Speaker C: One other thing about atmos, when you work in atmos, and you. And I'm not even talking about the binaural render for your stereo track, which is one thing, this atmos thing that apple does and all that, which, you know, my 66 year old years, you know. But even the stereo mix down that I get out of atmos sounds just really interesting and more dynamic. And I heard I can use way less reverb because I hear the reverbs, which I don't always like, I don't really want to hear them. I actually use a lot of post production reverbs. Cause I like making tiny little spaces on things to just get like that. So I use outdoor on alto verb. I use the outdoor spaces all the time on, like, guitars. And so I lost my train of thought. But did I answer the question? [00:35:37] Speaker B: No, Doug, go ahead, please. [00:35:39] Speaker D: So because of the improvement in the tools over the last many years, I now do what took four people to do. So it's gone from, you know, five or six people making an atmos mix to just myself and maybe a little bit of help from somebody else. That's it. And instead of taking a month and a half, we're down to, like, a couple of weeks. That's it. [00:36:03] Speaker C: I can tell you that one of the downsides was my piles and piles of analog outboard gear are now piles and piles of door openers and plant stands and stuff like that. I just. I finally, the only thing I ever use outboard is an occasional outboard reverb that I'm getting into digitally in and out. I've decided at this point, it just doesn't make any sense anymore. So as much as I love some of my old gear and stuff, and it's funny because I'm actually. Well, I love microphones. So instead of spending the money on a compressor, I'm just going to buy another microphone. [00:36:42] Speaker B: Yep. So I love hearing all your responses to that when I talk to mixer friends. I am so gratified to hear that. Look, I've been mixing atmos for a while now. I know what happens when I pull all the levers. If I have a post super coming to me with a show and saying, we're only going to deliver five one, they say, I'm going to mix an Amos anyway, and I'm going to give you a rerender. It's. It's just how I like to work now. And I'm glad to hear your comments are kind of, to an extent, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but kind of mirroring that philosophy now that the maturity of some of the mixers with technology is, has really come along. Before I ask my next question, how are we on time? I didn't. Fantastic. All right, so that leads us to our next question. You guys have gobs of experience with Dolby Atmos for artists or engineers or producers who are just getting started. Where do you recommend they start? What's a good jumping off point for getting your feet wet? [00:37:41] Speaker A: Your living room. [00:37:42] Speaker D: Seriously? Yeah. Just listening. [00:37:48] Speaker C: Well, yeah, but binaural sort of rendered atmos thing because it gives you. My assistant is here somewhere. Walter, where are you? There he is. Walter does atmos. He renders atmos and he listens on headphones in his house, and he gets to learn that way. And he did an atmos class and everything like that. So that's the great thing about this is it's just so available now, and all you need is a. A decent laptop, good set of headphones, and some software, and you can start learning. And then when the time comes, if you need to, want to buy a set of genelecs or go to the next level, you go to the next level. [00:38:33] Speaker B: Doug and Scott speed round advice. [00:38:36] Speaker D: That's basically it. Just start listening. Listening to things you like and figure out why you like it. You know, find out, you know, where is, you know, where is the music being placed? Where are the effects? How are they ending up? What's the decay? How does the dialogue sound to you? And then just start getting your hands on content and experimenting as much as you can. [00:38:56] Speaker A: And as you say, as a musician, I call it the inner ear. So when I can read a script, I can tell the director exactly what the show's gonna sound like. It's just this weird thing. Cause I hear it on the script close, and I think that if you listen, if you love music, if you love film and you watch a lot of it, you start getting a vocabulary and you start piecing the same thing directors do when they go, I got that cut from Godfather, and I put that camera angle from this movie, and they become encyclopedic of how to tell a story with a camera. Same thing we're doing with audio. I think the first thing you do is have to listen. You need to know what people are doing, hear what they're doing. So when you finally get your instrument, you have an idea what you want to do with it. Rather than going, I got a panner. You're still going to experiment. You're still going to need to put one object in, contrast it with another object, and see how it plays. And how do you want to do with EQ and all the things that you do in the mixing process and design process. But listening, I think, is always the first thing. The second thing is just play with the gear in any way you can. And interestingly, if we say headphones, it's the beginning of it. But yesterday, I got my ears scanned for VME over at Sony. I have no clue how it sounds because I haven't played with it yet, but the concept is, theoretically, I could put the headphones on and hear atmos at the Novak stage. We'll see how that works. [00:40:30] Speaker C: Piece of software. And I'm not here to show software, but there's a piece of software that's my mix room. And you put on headphones and it renders it into headphones. Like, you're sitting in my mix room, and, you know, is it exactly sitting in my mix room? Of course not. But is it a good space to listen to music? [00:40:48] Speaker A: Yes. [00:40:50] Speaker C: I love what you said. I taught that to Walter when he first started working with me. I said, okay, pick out five albums that you love. Sit there with a piece of paper and sit in the middle of the speakers. And I want you to write down where every instrument is and where is the reverb and where is that ear training. It's all about ear training. I mean, it's everything we do. All the technical stuff doesn't mean anything if you don't. You know, if you're not good at music, you know. So the ear training is so important, and same thing with film. And I love the idea of really, you know, unfortunately, I do it when I don't want to do it. Like, when I go to any movie, I'm like, oh, that was cool. Reverb. And this is like, shut up and just enjoy the movie, Alan. [00:41:31] Speaker B: We're all ruined on it. [00:41:32] Speaker C: Yeah, we are. [00:41:34] Speaker B: Before we start Q and A, we heard the dune music piece. Did either of you bring clips that you were dying for folks to hear? All right, questions. Who would like to ask a question? [00:41:43] Speaker C: Hello. [00:41:43] Speaker E: Thank you. I'm thinking earlier you mentioned about visuals accompanying the Dolby Atmos, and I'm remembering a couple of the exhibits at Epcot in Florida. They were 360 degree films for the chinese and the canadian exhibits. There were nine cameras and nine microphones and nine speakers. And I. I would have to call that immersive, if anything else. So I was wondering if you guys envision with this technology of the sphere in Vegas and such as Atmos, kind of leading the way into that next generation of film. [00:42:20] Speaker B: Scott, who mixed the latest version of the Canada movie, he does actually use the Dolby Atmos renderer. So the Atmos tools are being used in non traditional spaces, including some of the themed entertainment venues, including Epcot. [00:42:34] Speaker C: Do you know what the first surround spaced movie was? [00:42:39] Speaker E: I do. I do. [00:42:40] Speaker C: It was fantasia. It was fantasia. That's right. [00:42:44] Speaker A: I. Yep. [00:42:46] Speaker C: So this has been around a long time. We're just getting better at it. [00:42:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:42:50] Speaker A: And it's nice to have the spatial now with atmos. I did a t two when it used to be universal, and it was 24 speakers, and we were all saying, like, what Pandora can we use? [00:43:01] Speaker C: I actually did the millennium Joe at Epcot. All the music you heard, like the fireworks and when they're rolling around. I did it. And we actually went down to Epcot, and I mixed it at Epcot from 11:00 p.m. to 06:00 a.m. and I had a map of all the speakers and I could put anything I wanted to. Well, within limitations of 1999, I could put anything where I wanted to. But we recorded it at Abbey Road, and I put up microphones everywhere because I knew I would have that. [00:43:28] Speaker B: So it's funny, folks, on the theme. [00:43:30] Speaker A: You become night mixers. [00:43:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I have some good friends in that space, and they're like, hey, let's rub some Dolby on it. And I always tell them, thank you, but when it's a bespoke venue, by all means, use our creative tools. But we're not going to make money on it, because at the end of the day, you're just going to print off tracks for each speaker and play it out of a bin loop. And, yeah, Dolby doesn't make money there, so thank you, but it's not really our business. Next question. [00:43:52] Speaker A: Hi. [00:43:53] Speaker F: This question's more pointed to and Scott on talking about recording and creating from ground up in the Atmos space, just concepts. How do you consider what you call your what? How do you commit your objects choice on a per mic level? And are you finding yourself leaning towards tendencies of gain staging per where you imagine it in space and your different mics? Maybe dpas or just to open up about how you guys are doing it? [00:44:27] Speaker C: Well. [00:44:30] Speaker A: No, go for it. I do. [00:44:33] Speaker C: This one is exactly what you're talking about when it. Ian, I have some ADMs here from this video game. I did Jedi survivor, where it was just a singular tootie orchestra, and I used atmos for microphones. And the way I did it, all credit to Ron Bartlett. Again, I'm going to talk about Ron Bartlett every day of my life until I die. I started with his template, and basically what he does is there's five sets of auxes, and you can just raise yourself up in it and you can sit there with the microphones and just play with what wants to go where. So, like, I found that I like raising up the low woodwinds, you know, so I can have the woodwinds sitting up in a slight bit back. And I find that, you know, my low end wants to be a little bit more grounded. My big drums want to be grounded, but a little bit wider and brought up a little bit. So there's no rules. This is the beauty of this, folks. This is everyone is going to use it exactly the way it's good for them. And no one's wrong and no one's right. I won't do something and say to someone, oh, no, you didn't do what I did, so you're wrong. It doesn't mean anything. So you just got to experiment around. But in terms of recording, I have, like I said, an array. It is DPA 4041s, actually. It's an eleven mic array that I put up. LCR sides, surrounds, and a ceiling quad that goes with the deck tree. And it just fills in all the empty spaces that you never knew you had when you were just using your decua tree for the last 40 years. So, guys, we're sort of at the bleeding edge of a new generation of how music's going to sound. [00:46:22] Speaker B: We're at time right now. Alan, Doug and Scott, thank you guys so much. This was. I learned a lot. [00:46:28] Speaker G: Thanks for watching broadcast. To post, please make sure to subscribe to the podcast to receive future episodes, follow key Code Media on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram to receive news on additional AB broadcast and post production technology content. See you next time, folks.