The release of the summer blockbuster movie, Prince Of Persia, provided another opportunity for Dolby to extend broadcast support to a Disney special event – this time involving interviews with the film’s principal cast that were simultaneously broadcast to premieres around the world.
The first interviews were transmitted from London on the morning of the film’s release and in time for evening premieres in Japan and Australia. The second round was simulcast in the afternoon from West London, timed to fit with the premieres in the UK and Italy. These were also recorded and retransmitted at midnight for a late afternoon premiere in Mexico City.
While this was not the first multi-timezone premiere involving Dolby and Disney, it was the first where Disney wanted to ensure that the sound for the introductory interviews was also multichannel. However, as the premiere took place in the immediate aftermath of the UK general election, no OB vehicles capable of broadcasting in 5.1 surround were available. Outside Broadcast expert Arqiva was able to spare a satellite uplink truck and Sassy Films provided stereo OB facilities at both the Dorchester Hotel and the Westfield Centre, but nothing capable of 5.1 broadcast was available.
SoundField provided the answer: ‘We had been considering the possibility of using a SoundField DSF-2 digital microphone to do the interviews anyway,’ says Dolby Sound Consultant Richard Stockdale, who was responsible for the audio broadcast from the London-based events. ‘With SoundField’s DSF-3 surround processor, that would have given us a nice result in digital, discrete-channel 5.1. But then we found out we couldn’t mix live in 5.1 at the event. By coincidence, though, SoundField had been down to see us a couple of weeks beforehand and had left us a UPM-1 to experiment with…’
SoundField’s UPM-1 stereo-to-5.1 upmix processor was designed to convert a stereo broadcast mix to fold-down-compatible 5.1 with the minimum of artefacts. Mono content, like the dialogue in the interviews conducted for the premieres, is separated from an original stereo mix and may be spread across the front three channels of a surround mix, or restricted to the 5.1 centre channel. More reverberant audio, like the crowd noise from the people watching the film’s stars, is placed into the rear channels, making a natural-sounding surround mix.
‘SoundField sent us three more UPM-1s for this premiere, in addition to the unit we already had on loan from them at our HQ,’ adds Stockdale. ‘We used four in total because we needed a main and a backup unit at both of the broadcast locations, at the Dorchester and at the Westfield. The UPM-1 was very simple to use – we just plumbed in the UPM-1s in the Arqiva uplink between the feed from the stereo OB scanner and our DP569 Dolby Digital encoders, before sending the whole thing out to the satellites from the uplink. We had an engineer picking up the satellite feed and monitoring it in 5.1 at our HQ in Wootton Bassett in the West of England, but in the event, there weren’t any problems. In short, the UPM-1 and gave us the 5.1 mix we needed for the premieres. Job done!’
More: www.soundfield.com
