Emerging immersive audio is now firmly on SMPTE's agenda. In an overview of the activities being undertaken by the newly established Technology Committee on Digital Sound Systems (25CSS), Brian Vessa, Executive Director, Digital Audio Mastering, Sony Pictures Entertainment declared audio to be 50 per cent of the experience “yet little attention has been paid to audio during digital projection rollout.”
During the NAB Technology Summit on Cinema, co-produced by SMPTE, he reported that SMPTE's 25CSS study group is setting out to address this. “Making a movie soundtrack sound consistent in multiple venues is a big challenge. One of the issues is that many sound systems in theatres are two decades old, system upgrades are rare and the acoustics are variable. The majority of cinema theatre calibration is done by technicians without a lot of training and the industry's current standards are also becoming dated.”
The study group is to lay the ground work for a new audio standard which will more closely model how people actually hear, he explained.
“It will need be a standard that can be performed in a straight forward way in the field. A project to incorporate immersive audio content – such as Dolby's Atmos or Barco's Auro 3D – into the new standard will start this July. “The industry doesn't want a variety of ways to deliver immersive audio to cinemas,” he said.
John Hurst, CTO CineCert, provided an overview of the standardization work ongoing at SMPTE's 21DC committee including on Higher Frame Rates DCPs “where there are concrete moves to standardize HFR” and the addition of stereoscopic rendering for subtitles in a draft document to be published in June.
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