Fun with Dolby
Greg, my sound designer / mix master, sent me an edit of Dolby 5.1 audio last night along with a final stereo mix down. I have never worked with surround sound so it was hit or miss if I would get it to work. As I have said in the past, the shots were all composited individually in After Effects, the final edit is in Final Cut, mostly because it allows for easy assembly of assets, the best analogy I can make is its like using InDesign to layout a comic as opposed to laying it out in Photoshop, which would be tedious.
The WAV file came with 6 channels, so when you dump it into Final Cut it fills 6 audio fields (instead of the normal 2 for stereo). When you play it some really mucky mess of audio comes out of one speaker. You have to go in and fine tune all these settings basically assigning the 6 channels to something. At a loss of what to do I found this great tutorial on it at Ken Stones Final Cut Pro 2 Website.
So the 6 channels are sitting there doing their thing, but you still need to tell them where to go. Unfortunately I found that Final Cut only supports L R C LFE Ls Rs (or Left | Right|Center|Subwoofer|Surround Left|Surround Right). The playback came out off center and without any base. My track for “The Lift” was L C R Ls Rs LFE. That said I can’t listen to it in Final Cut. If you read though the tutorial it shows you how to export an MOV using the Linear PCM codec which supports 5.1 surround. The key difference for me was to check the channel part under audio settings when making the MOV. Once I did this everything worked fine and I was able to then listen to the result through the simulator in DVD Studio Pro.
In the end it was quite the experience and a good lesson in doing something I am not going to end up doing very often.
Making of a shot – Shot 13
This week I am posting a much earlier shot from my film ‘The Lift’. In this shot the main character is leaving for work, or what ever she does. As you saw from one of the other later shots I posted she doesn’t make it to where she was going.
Something I haven’t really talked about yet, and I am always asked, is when will it be finished. I am looking to complete this film in early 2010, actually the end of January. I am attempting to submit this film to Annecy which is apparently celebrating its 50th anniversary. If you are interested I took some pictures when I was there in 2003 (Annecy Animation Festival Pictures).
Enjoy!
Making of a shot – Shot 51
I am posting this new video on my blog a little late this time, a week late actually. I forgot to do this last week, though I did get it up on Youtube and Vimeo. This week I won’t be doing a video as its a holiday in the US.
Shot 51, what you see below is the shot immediately after last weeks, the girl gets pulled down the sewer drain and transported to another world.
Other than that I think I am pretty set on the new title of the film “The Lift”, as my sister Emma says “Once and Never Again” sounded lame. I think i agree.
Making of a shot – Shot 50
This week I created an almost 7 minute tutorial showing my process of developing a shot from the animatic to the final video. I demonstrated how I use Flash to create the animation and color the frames, Blender to generate the 3D scenes and After Effects for composting.
YouTube Kohrtoons Studio Channel
Vimeo Kohrtoons Studio Channel
On another note the film is currently called “Once and Never Again” though I am considering changing it to “The Lift”. The premise of the film is an elevator experience gone wrong, a cautionary tale about holding the elevator door for people (though you wouldn’t know it from this shot)
Based out of Brooklyn NY, Robert Kohr is the owner of