reported
by: Mr. Kenneth Delbridge
Committee Member
(Term 2000/2001)
On November 21, 2000, AES
Singapore Section organized a talk on the subject of Preparation of Audio
Tracks for DVD by Jeff Levison of DTS, focusing on preparing
DTS soundtracks for DVD. The group consisted of 8 AES members and
23 non-members. The attendees were served refreshments prior to the
beginning of the presentation and as they filed into the presentation area
(the TV studio at Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s Department of Film Studies),
they were greeted with sight and sound of DTS’ showcase DVD on a projector
and Genelec surround speaker set-up; this was the 4th event for the AES Term
2000/2001.
Mr. Jeff Levison
speaking to his audience during talk on the "Preparation of Audio tracks for
DVD" at Ngee Ann Polytechnic - photograph by Mr.
Michael Teh.
After an introduction by AES
Singapore Section Chairman, Robert Soo, he handed the evening over to
Jeff
Levison. Mr. Levison is the Director of Post Production
Services at Digital Theater Systems (DTS) and has over twenty-three years of
experience in the film industry and has been at the forefront of digital
multi-channel audio since 1989. For the last three years, he has been
involved with bringing the DTS audio encoding technology to the DVD and CD
markets. Levison has personally encoded over 200 titles in the DTS
format, including recent titles like “Gladiator” in the DTS-ES Discrete 6.1
format. Other titles that Jeff has worked on in the past include
“Apollo 13”, “Get Shorty” & “Terminator 2, Judgment Day”.
The growth of the DVD consumer
market in the US and other countries around the world (including Singapore)
have created a widespread acceptance of the DVD format for home
entertainment and consumers are now more aware of the added value of the
surround sound and multi-channel capabilities that DVD offers for home
cinema and multi-channel music. While Dolby Digital is included as part of
the spec for audio on DVDs, the DTS format with its higher specifications
and bandwidth has established itself as a preferred choice of formats for
the discerning home cinema enthusiast.
| Levison
began his presentation by covering the development of multi-channel
playback; from the stability of mono playback, he explained,
multi-channel sound development focused on the shortcomings of stereo
playback; among those were a desire for more dynamic range, better
frequency response and positional accuracy for the technicians and an
expanded realism and illusion outside of natural sound for artists.
The obvious application for
multi-channel playback soon became feature films. |
Mr. Jeff Levison
discussing with some members of the audience on his presentation cum
demo. |
Giving an eye-opening history
lesson to the audience, many of whom may have never been into a theatre with
anything less than Dolby Stereo playback, Levison explained how
multi-channel movie soundtracks have developed over the years. Feature film
soundtracks started out as mono playback and this has been retained today as
the center speaker in all multi-channel formats. That has grown to
accommodate the large format playback of modern cinemas, going through
various formats and developments, such as Fantasound and Todd-AO, to what is
now common today in cinema playback, namely the Dolby Digital, DTS and SDDS
formats. A brief explanation of the way that these soundtracks are delivered
to the audience (optical digital tracks on the film print or CD-ROM playback
locked with time-code) was also given.
With DVD, home consumers have
benefited because of the format’s ability to reproduce multi-channel
playback for home releases of feature films and mixes of music in
multi-channel formats of CDs. Levison proceeded to give a detailed
explanation of the encoder / decoder hardware units. The decoder is, as he
explained, very straight forward in taking the digital stream of the DTS
signal and splitting that up into the 5.1 or 6.1 tracks for playback through
speakers. It’s the encoder where very strict rules had to be followed for
appropriate encoding for DVD.
| The process
involved first acquiring the 5.1 or 6.1-channel stems from which the
print master of a film was created on a Tascam MMR8 format tape.
Sometimes certain adjustments would be made to these original stems to
optimize the soundtrack for the home theater environment where certain
characteristics of cinema playback would not apply. Once the soundtrack
had been approved for home theater, the 5.1 or 6.1-channel master would
be encoded as a bitstream file in the required DTS format via the
encoder. Highly technical questions were raised at this point by members
of the audience and were answered in detail by Levison.
Of course, given Levison’s
experience in the film industry, the audience could not help but ask him
to share a few of his more interesting anecdotes from his work and he
kept their attention with hilarious insight into details of the mix for |
Mr. Jeff
Levison (right) receiving the speaker's plaque from the Section
Chairman, Mr. Robert Soo - photograph by Mr.
Michael Teh. |
“Armageddon”, the lack of a LFE
channel in the Academy Award winning mix for “Speed” and the extensive work
done by director David Fincher for the DVD release of his acclaimed film,
“Seven”.
For his wrap up, Levison
played samples of music encoded in DTS – almost all cinemas in Singapore are
equipped with surround sound playback, but DTS for music CDs still has a
novelty value for many and Levison showed off the technical and
artistic benefits of the format for recording artists.
8 members and 23
guests posing for a group photo shoot after the talk on "Preparation of
Audio Tracks for DVD" by Mr. Jeff Levison (the right guy in blazer with the
AES banner) on Tuesday, 21st
November 2000 - photograph by Mr. Michael Teh.
AES Singapore Section Chairman
Robert Soo addressed the group again and thanked Jeff for taking
the time to share with the group on the subject and presented him with an
AES plaque of appreciation. The group posed for a photograph; as Levison
packed up his gear, he very good-naturedly continued to share his stories of
working with the major movie studios with members of the audience who stayed
behind and clearly would not tire of hearing more of his Hollywood
anecdotes. |
