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This topic comprises 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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Topic: How long will Dolby Atmos last?
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Terry Lynn-Stevens
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1081
From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Dec 2012
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posted 04-12-2015 10:39 AM
I don't think Dolby Atmos will last very long. Aside from a few fan boys who simply cannot see reality, Dolby Atmos is failing in the cinema. Now you have pointed out that there are only 26 movies being released this year in Atmos, it looks like Furious 7, Ant-man, Mad Max Fury Road, Jurassic World are all being left out, that cannot be good for Dolby Atmos ![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
Compared to Dolby Sound formats of the past, the modern cinema landscape has way too many competing brands and options to really allow Dolby to have a chance. With all these competing brands, it becomes very hard to effectively get the Atmos message out to customers. I think 9 out of 10 people have no idea what Atmos is or how it works. Also, a very good 5.1 sound system is already good enough IMHO.
If I were a cinema owner, I would probably upgrade my projection sooner than I would upgrade my sound system (that is assuming I already have 5.1). Consumers will see the benefit of upgrading projections systems more than they will hear the difference between Atmos and 5.1.
I also think all of these Atmos enabled tablets, cell phones and lap tops is not helping Atmos either. Perhaps the writing is on the wall, and the lack of film releases in Atmos is proving it.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 04-12-2015 12:20 PM
quote: Thomas Jonsson
What do you think - will Dolby Atmos go the same way as SDDS? If the studios didn´t bother to add even 2 extra channels in the long run, how long will they bother to add a whole bunch of channels?
The reason why SDDS failed wasn't the extra two channels, but simply because it added nothing relevant for most venues and most movies and it wasn't vastly cheaper than DTS or SRD.
Also, creating a Dolby Atmos mix isn't about adding just a bunch of extra channels. Those next generation sound formats try to do away with the notion of "sound channels". Dolby Atmos is clearly focussed on the way practically all movies will be mixed in the future, once tools like ProTools have been fully adapted to this. In this situation, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, Auro3D will be just another checkbox on your export dialog. In a perfect world, we don't even have a specific Atmos, DTS:X or other format, but just one single, open MDA format, a lot like the current 5 or 7 channel LPCM sound track on each and every DCP release.
quote: Terry Monohan
Some new sound company may come along in the future and know how to advertise to get the public interested in going to a movie that has a special wrap a round sound track.
All of those next generation object based sound formats are already "wrap around" sound tracks. The only real upgrade path from there on is increasing spatial resolution and "holographic sound" with techniques like Wave Front Synthesis. The beauty of a well designed object sound format is, that you won't even need a new format to accomplish this.
quote: Terry Lynn-Stevens
Compared to Dolby Sound formats of the past, the modern cinema landscape has way too many competing brands and options to really allow Dolby to have a chance.
In the "Digital on Film" age we had SRD, DTS and SDDS... Now we have three special formats competing against each other: Atmos, Auro3D and DTS:X. I don't see any difference. Besides that we had at least one other attempt at digital sound and an endless number of analog sound formats and configurations to choose from.
quote: Mike Blakesley
If Atmos doesn't last it's due to one biggest base reason: Cost.
That's probably the only reason why Atmos could fail in the market. I guess Dobly will still hold on to their premium pricing for a while, because they still see the professional version of Atmos as a premium sound system. But it's clear their competition isn't sleeping and they will eventually force the price for Atmos down. It will never be dirt cheap when done right, off course, but at least it will become much more affordable.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 04-12-2015 02:12 PM
The real question is, how much will the difference a patron notices in the theatre influence their ticket-buying decision? I have come to the conclusion that the public will shell out money for even the worst presentation if it's a movie they want to see and it's convenient. We have two theatres (originally single screens) that were tortured into the worst plexes and consistently have the worst presentation I have ever witnessed, yet they do astounding business weekend after weekend. EVERYTHING about the presentation in both these dogs is severely compromised -- not just what is on the screens (from those screens being set too high to accomodate the exit doors on the same wall to them being under lit to hotspots to damaged surfaces) and sound (from dead channels to harsh eqs to rattling voice coils), to everything else like filthy floors, broken seats, to smelly, dark, dank, rooms, yet drive by either of them on a Friday or Saturday night and there is a flurry of activity with patrons lining up to get in; they can't hand they money over fast enough. Go to Yelp and look for the Pavilion Cinema or the Kent Theatre in Brooklyn, and read the slew of negative reviews. But this doesn't seem to hurt their disgusting business.
My point is, presentation quality seems to be trumped by convenience most of the time for too many people. Expensive formats like Atmos, while they may be the norm for flagship theatres, the rathole "cinema" that has spent fractions of what that flagship theater spent for an Atmos install, still gets packed for the big releases, still charges the same ticket price as the flagship with Altos and if it's actually got even a 5.1 system in there, the patron is lucky.
People STILL seem to put up with and patronize the painfully large number of below par, below spec, below what any of us would consider marginally acceptable presentation; they have no problem patronizing the garbage houses. And btw, at lease one of these two places mentioned has very good demographics -- upscale, affluent, gentrified neighborhoods; the clientele are not unsophisticated. One would think they should know better and would seek out the better cinemas, say with Atmos. That doesn't seem to happen, and it's not like there are no other quality cinemas in the area -- there are.
Over and over again the majority of the public will choose convenience over quality and it is a real question if Atmos will make any significant impact on pulling asses into seats. So what would motivate an exhibitor to spend all that money for so little return on his investment, other than prestige...the ability so say that at least on a few screens he's got state-of-the-art. Businessmen, especially exhibitors, don't usually like to spend a lot of money just for bragging rights.
Problem is, Atmos has limited marketing value vs. it's cost vs. it's ability to draw in significant number of patrons, while the crapola houses show no sign of going out of business due to lack of Atmos, let alone due to their puny TV sized screen, or subspec lumen levels or lack of an effective cleaning crew or their overpriced stale concessions, etc.
That said, since it may be the way sound designers want to mix their soundtracks so it will become ubiquitous coming out of the studio, but like other high-end soundtrack mixes (7.1, 8) when it gets down to the indivitual theatres, it may never reach very high saturation.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 04-13-2015 03:12 AM
Like I mentioned before, Dolby seemingly isn't interested in the low end market just yet. They want to "milk the cow" by asking premium prices for their proprietary Atmos technology. Right now, they're also the only one with products in the MDA field and some credible install base and movie titles. They will be shooting themselves in the foot by slashing the prices and they must know nobody is going to shell out those prices for anything but their most premium theaters and I think they're fine with it, until now.
Like Carsten already mentioned, they won't be able to run away from competing, open MDA formats forever. Maybe they will try at first and they can effectively limit the adaptation of other sound formats by just not implementing necessary features in their server lineup for example. But they cannot play that game forever, because eventually they will find themselves bypassed by their competition.
Also, sound engineers will indeed continue to create mixes in spatial audio formats, why won't they? A master mix that retains spatial information, rather than discrete channels can be re-exported and rendered to practically any discrete audio system one can dream up. It will also simplify their workflow, because there is actually no real need anymore to create a new mix for every odd format that might be conceived somewhere.
It may take a little bit of rethinking for the real old-school folks, but from what I've seen, I'm pretty sure most audio folks are pretty excited about those kind of mixing approaches. And if they aren't, the studios certainly will be, because an object based audio master will avoid expensive remixing costs for future re-releases.
If your sound processor supports this open MDA format, it can render it on your sound system, no matter how many discrete channels you've connected to it. If it's a classical 5.1 or 7.1 discrete channel layout, it will also be mapped to this layout. If it is a 200-channel mega-premium deluxe layout, it will be mapped to this layout too.
It's not like this "real time audio mapping" is anything fancy as of 2015. The raw processing power to do this for quite a bunch of channels is something a modern smartphone could do.
So, in a way this would create a single inventory audio mix that scales across any conceivable layout, anything from mono to a sheer infinite number of speakers.
If cinemas are actually going to implement extra discrete channels for this is another question entirely. But sound formats never really were a reliable indicator for presentation standards. One could have a huge Dolby Digital logo on the marquee, but what good is this if the B-chain is a bunch of crap or the acoustics in the room just plainly suck?
For this, there used to be THX. Certification is a useful thing if it means something. The problem with THX is that the brand was never fully understood, but at least it gave a hint about the quality of a certified theater to those who actually did know what it stood for.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 04-13-2015 10:01 PM
quote: Thomas Jonsson
If you look at the list of Dolby Atmos movies on Dolby´s website, there are 64 in 2013, 54 in 2014 and 26 released/upcoming for 2015. More might be added, but it looks like the number of movies are decreasing. Any opinion on this?
Look back at movie releases that featured 70mm in the print inventory. The number of movie releases with 70mm blow-up prints went up and down like crazy between the late 1970's and early 1990's. The numbers weren't consistent. Star Wars made a big splash with its 70mm prints in 1977, but it took a few years for Hollywood to go from releasing a handful to perhaps a dozen movies with 70mm per year to releasing more than 20 movies with 70mm in 1985. Yet no one was calling 70mm a failure back then.
There's not nearly as many Dolby Atmos equipped theaters in the United States at this point as there was 70mm equipped theater screens back at the peak of 70mm at the end of the 1980's. But there's already a lot more movies mixed in Atmos per year than there ever was with 70mm.
quote: Mike Blakesley
Can you imagine what would have happened with digital sound if it had cost $40,000 or more per screen?
Back in the 1990-92 time frame a theater installing 5.1 digital surround brand new would have had to spend at least that much. The Cinema Digital Sound reader and processor cost $20,000 in 1990. The first Dolby DA-10 system also had a $20,000 price tag. If the theater was existing and had a 70mm projection system and 4.2 or 5.1 wired system they didn't have much extra to buy. But if the theater was a new build they had to add in the 5.1 capable cinema processor, crossover, speakers, etc.
Another key thing back then: "THX" was the only acronym being tossed about and it didn't add a $3 to $6 price premium on the movie ticket price back then (and THX wasn't exactly cheap to incorporate into a theater either). Today we have the alphabet soup of all the different digital big screen theaters and they all cost extra to enter. If they're going to peel more dollars out of the customers' wallets they need to be delivering more than single projector video and ordinary 5.1 surround sound.
quote: Mike Blakesley
The studios know that there's a new 'blockbuster' every couple of weeks, so their expensive Atmos soundtrack will only get that first couple weeks' exposure in the big Atmos auditorium before it's shunted off to the cheap small 5.1 auditorium. And people aren't clamoring for immersive sound anyway; instead they're paying premium prices for oversized unmasked "Liemax" screens running 5.1 sound, so the studios figuring "what's the point?" It's not surprising.
There are few things more profitable than uninformed customers who don't know any better. There's at least some people here in Lawton who are really happy Carmike is putting an IMAX-branded auditorium in its new Patriot 13 theater currently under construction. They're probably unaware they're going to be paying close to $15 per ticket just to see a 2D show (this is based on prices of Carmike's Fayetteville, NC Patriot 14 showing Furious 7). And they're probably also unaware there's a good chance the IMAX company will install some less expensive, possibly hand-me-down, outmoded 2K projectors and 5.0 sound. I'm not expecting IMAX to install its new breed of dual 4K laser based projectors and 12 channel surround sound in this theater. I'll be very surprised if they do so. Then again, I did expect them to build a cheaper Big D house in this theater, so who knows?
The unwitting public angle cuts both ways however.
A public that doesn't understand or know the details about what makes "IMAX" great can also grow fickle and uncaring about it without any warning. They may just decide watching movies for free via popcorn time is better than paying $16 per ticket and another $12 for popcorn and an oil drum sized cup of soda pop. Then the theater operator will have to roll out the specifics on why the viewer should watch the movie at the "IMAX" theater rather than at home. If the details really don't matter to the customer then the movie theater operator is totally screwed.
quote: Marcel Birgelen
Also, creating a Dolby Atmos mix isn't about adding just a bunch of extra channels. Those next generation sound formats try to do away with the notion of "sound channels". Dolby Atmos is clearly focussed on the way practically all movies will be mixed in the future, once tools like ProTools have been fully adapted to this. In this situation, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, Auro3D will be just another checkbox on your export dialog. In a perfect world, we don't even have a specific Atmos, DTS:X or other format, but just one single, open MDA format, a lot like the current 5 or 7 channel LPCM sound track on each and every DCP release.
It's no big deal to pan audio objects to different speakers and virtual positions in a room whether it's an ordinary 5.1 layout or something more elaborate in a 3D cube metaphor.
The interesting possibility with DTS' Open MDA format is audio editing applications like ProTools and Audition might be able to incorporate MDA editing capability without users having to pay extra for a plug-in. As it stands, things like lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding have turned into standard features in some audio editing applications.
quote: Steve Guttag
I should be noted that the CP850 price has indeed come down quite a bit since its original release and compared to the likes of the CP200 (in its day), it isn't overly expensive. However, compared to all other DCinema processors, it scary expensive.
I don't know the current list price of the CP850, but my understanding is the price is closer to $30,000 than it is $20,000.
It's scary expensive to install a properly configured Dolby Atmos capable sound system. But then again there are theater operators like Bill Warren who install over $1 million of imported marble in a new movie theater. The ticket price premium of all those big screen digital theaters generates a lot of extra money that pay for a full tilt Atmos sound system relatively quickly.
One thing is certain: Atmos, Auro and DTS:X probably will never be practical for any modest, standard priced auditoriums even if their respective sound format processors were given away for free.
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