Dolby Atmos puts the viewer at the center of the action

Coinciding with the Goya and Oscar awards, Julian Pinn, director of film marketing for the EMEA region at Dolby, analyzes in this Tribune the role of sound in cinema as a crucial element in telling the story. Dolby was the first company to opt for surround sound. Today, it continues to lead the next generation of cinematic sound with the launch of Dolby Atmos.

With more than 40 years of collaboration with studios and movie theaters, Dolby It was the first company that opted for surround sound in movies. Today, it continues to lead the next generation of cinematic sound with the launch of Dolby Atmos.

When filming a film, the artistic intention of the director is to reproduce in the most exact way the idea he has in his head, in order to involve the audience emotionally with the story.

The process of shooting a film is like choreography, where professionals from different areas intervene: producers, cameras, scriptwriters, stylists, actors, makeup artists... We cannot forget one of the most important parts for the film to come to life, the designers and sound mixers.

Sound is a crucial element in telling the story, it represents more than 50% of the total experience when we watch a movie. It is vital when it comes to modeling the emotions of the audience in front of the screen, to make them feel the “visual” through sound. In cinema, sound goes unnoticed by the viewer. Therefore, the task of sound and creative designers, together with the director, is essential so that the audience feels that they are inside the action, thanks to an immersive sensory experience.

Until now, multichannel sound has allowed the director and editor to increase the tension when the action occurs, when a car jumps through the air and you hear glass breaking. Sound can transport the audience in the middle of a war, or a conversation in a restaurant, where the murmurs of other tables out of shot create the sound background of the on-screen dialogue.

With multichannel surround sound, the sound source in a movie was simulated over a small number of channels, each corresponding to the physical location of the speaker in the theater. However, this technology has some drawbacks that sound designers have often had to face. It is difficult to faithfully recreate the sounds of a movie, a whisper in the ear, the crackling of burning wood... Speakers do not always have a perfect frequency response or dynamic range. Furthermore, each movie theater and each dubbing studio has its own configuration, a number of speakers located in a specific way, which will determine the final result. All of this gives the director and sound designer complete confidence that their creative vision will be faithfully and coherently recreated wherever the film is projected.

So the limitations of channel-based mixing, with a limited number of audio sources in the auditorium, mean that audio post-production is a work of art.

The most realistic sound

¿Cómo pueden directores y profesionales del sonido ofrecer al espectador el sonido más realista? Con una tecnología totalmente novedosa en la mezcla de sonido para cine, Dolby Atmos permite evitar la imprecisión y la incoherencia propias de los sistemas multicanal. Gracias a la renderización de “objetos” sonoros a través de un gran número de altavoces en la sala, se crea una ilusión realista de que hay un número casi infinito de canales a tu alrededor, haciendo que el sonido vuele literalmente sobre la cabeza del espectador. Con Dolby Atmos se dan más posibilidades creativas, como si se diese más colores a la paleta del colorista, para crear la obra de arte.

Por primera vez, los profesionales del sonido no tienen que preocuparse de cómo están colocados los altavoces en la sala, con Dolby Atmos pueden centrar toda su atención en ubicar cada sonido específico para que coincida con la visión original del director. Los diseñadores de sonido tampoco se tienen que preocupar por cómo cambia un sonido a medida que se traslada de los altavoces frontales a los de surround. El sistema Atmos se ocupa de hacer coincidir el nivel y el timbre y de controlar los bajos, lo que asegura una transición suave y sin interrupciones mientras el sonido se desplaza de forma muy real por toda la sala.

Dolby Atmos provides a more natural and realistic sound field, offering content creators the ability to mix by objects, allowing full control over the location and movement of each sound or “object” anywhere in the room.

Además, uno de los aspectos más interesantes es la capacidad de Dolby Atmos de adaptarse a diferentes salas, desde un pequeño cine hasta un complejo multicine, proporcionando una experiencia totalmente optimizada en cada cine gracias al método por el que la banda sonora se masteriza y se ofrece en el cine. Esto permite que la banda sonora se renderice teniendo en cuenta el tamaño y la forma de cada sala, así como al tipo de altavoz y su ubicación.

We can conclude that Dolby Atmos is a new tool that improves the storytelling experience and allows it to provoke an emotional, realistic and enthusiastic reaction in the audience. It gives directors and content creators more abilities to tell the story exactly as it was originally conceived and entertain like never before. The future of film sound is here.