“It’d feel retrogressive not to use [Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos] in the future. Fortunately, everyone’s expecting it now for their more prominent projects. (…) It’s a huge new palette of options. We wouldn’t go back. We couldn’t.”
Bill Markham, Plimsoll’s series producer for Night on Earth
No going back
Now the show’s delivered, what has the overall experience been of working with Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision?
How did Dolby Atmos help differentiate the episodes?
CD: Each episode was in a different landscape – jungles, seas, ice – each had a different soundscape. We gave each sound designer two episodes and the freedom to build those soundscapes, but they also listened to each others’ shows to maintain some consistency and share discoveries. For example, underwater is such a joy in
Dolby Atmos. You can go from a nice shot looking down at the sea surface, all very mono, and as soon as you get immersed you get boom! Every speaker opens up and that’s a true Dolby Atmos moment. The point at which you hear the throb of the boat in “Dark Seas” is one of the high points of the series for me. Compare that with the polar bears and the Arctic quietness lifted by winds and storms. It’s a very different sonic palette, as was ‘Sleeping Cities’. Dolby Atmos is a new tool, all about new
palettes, and it scales so well. We’ve mixed in 5.1 for a long time, making decisions like if there’s a bird tweeting away, what speaker to put it in. Now I want this bird to carry on moving through the soundscape. You can do that in 5.1 but it’s very hard to make the whole soundscape immersive. With Dolby Atmos, when you’re in the jungle and it starts to rain, you start off hearing this high frequency noise from far above, then you hear clatter in the leaves, then it envelops the whole room. That’s just astonishing in a full set-up, but it still has to work on regular televisions without Dolby Atmos. We’ve found the downmix algorithm works so well at preserving a much more cinematic experience across devices than we’d been used to.
How was the experience of creating audio in Dolby Atmos and going to the final mix?
CD: Delivering on Dolby Atmos was fantastic for us because of the scalability. We mixed in our lovely big lined up theatre, checking all the time what downmixes were like, stereo compatibility and so on. We knew that the audience would get everything they could. If you’re lucky enough to have invested in a home Dolby Atmos sound system, you get to enjoy absolutely everything we mixed. If you’re on 5.1 surround, it scales beautifully. On headphones, you get the whole experience, that’s the joy of the downmix algorithm in Dolby Atmos, the big selling point for us. Whatever people are listening to, the mix is tailored for their environment, and nothing has really been thrown away. We check it all, of course, but have great faith in it. This was a big project with a large team. We had a concertinaed delivery, so we had three dubbing mixers, a Foley recordist, and seven sound designers. We all had our parts to play in this, and we were all very delighted with the end results.”
BM: We’re fans of the new technologies. It’s another step forward, like colour and HD. It’d feel retrogressive not to use them in the future. Fortunately, everyone’s expecting it now for their more prominent projects. And we’re so confident in it now. We know that we can deliver the Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos version, and the algorithmic downscaling to different audio and video mixes will produce results that are effectively as good as if they’d been mastered by hand. There’s always a few tweaks, but they’re simple. We know it fits perfectly with our production pipeline. We know we can precisely engineer our aesthetics to match any content, from mono to hyper-realistic. It’s a huge new palette of options. We wouldn’t go back. We couldn’t.”
“Underwater is such a joy in Dolby Atmos. You can go from a nice shot looking down at the sea surface, all very mono, and as soon as you get immersed you get boom! Every speaker opens up and that’s a true Dolby Atmos moment.”
Chris Domaille, dubbing mixer at Films@59
dolbyforprofessionals.com
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