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Yes I used to work for a circuit that had Screen X auditoriums. It is an interesting format if you aren’t interested in motion seats, although there are some screens that use both technologies. The CJ 4DX branded demos are particularly impressive.
I normally opt for IMAX as my PLF of choice but I think I will watch Top Gun: Maverick in Screen X. I believe TC actually visited one of our cinemas to view or approve the wing footage for the movie.
Barco made a system like that with the side panels. But being a life long photographer there is also such a thing as too wide. It will distract from tje story, something Cinerama never did. This system strikes my "too wide" chord.
I agree Mark. Aspect ratio changes only work for me in movies like Superman and The Road Warrior, where the image opens up after a prologue, or Galaxy Quest, where all three ratios are relevant to the storytelling.
With this, I would constantly be looking away from the center screen to make sure I wasn't missing something on the sides. But then again, I sit much closer than the perspective shown in the trailer. I wonder how this looks from the front quarter of the theater.
Kudos to them for trying something different, though, and bonus points for making it "constant height."
Good surround sound, a good and large picture, they all increase the immersion, but sometimes I think we're forgetting that a movie is a story being told in moving pictures (and sound) and NOT a theme park ride.
My problem with those newfangled ultra-wide-screen formats is that their imperfections are also far too distracting. Those "three panels" don't even try to align, like Cinerama did. Even Barco Escape at least reduced the angle between the panels to something below 90 degrees...
If someone presents an ultra-wide-screen format, presented on a deeply curved screen without any visible seams, then I'd actually may get somewhat excited again. Until then, I consider those technologies distractive novelty fads.
For me, it's just like another fairground attraction, even though friends of mine like it, and attend ScreenX shows at the Mercedes square UCI, a complex normally known for private screenings at regular cost, not much attended.
I prefer sound systems, as I learnt in Culver City and Marin county in the 90s, 85% of the immersion in a movie is the sound design.
Go, and make dynamic, lifelike mixes, offer bright and contrasty color images on a large screen (not an overly large, dim one that requires silver coatings) in 4k. And I'm happy to follow a good story and acting.
For me, it's just like another fairground attraction, even though friends of mine like it, and attend ScreenX shows at the Mercedes square UCI, a complex normally known for private screenings at regular cost, not much attended.
I prefer sound systems, as I learnt in Culver City and Marin county in the 90s, 85% of the immersion in a movie is the sound design.
Go, and make dynamic, lifelike mixes, offer bright and contrasty color images on a large screen (not an overly large, dim one that requires silver coatings) in 4k. And I'm happy to follow a good story and acting.
I'm on your side Stefan. I still like a good 7.1 system the best. I guess they taught us well at those places about how and why.. Even Atmos still fails to impress me very much. Atmos comes across as just another gimmick for theaters to market and do an upcharge on. Dolby never sold gimmicks until Atmos...
I'm firmly in the Screen-X is a gimmick camp. I really hate it when people try to compare it to Cinerama...they are completely different. Cinerama didn't want the seams and it did everything it could to de-emphasize them/blend them. That was merely the technology of the day and the same people that did Cinerama were fresh off of doing Vitarama for training the military (with even more projectors). Cinerama didn't have the side panels pop on/off all throughout the movie, like Screen-X. Cinerama puts all of the image out there, mostly in front of you, unless you happen to be in the very front. Screen-X pops on/off and projects on the side walls (on their "screen" material...not just random wall covering) and it has very pronounced seams on the mating between the normal screen and the walls.
Dolby Atmos I don't consider a gimmick. Not that it can't be used as a gimmick but there is no inherent gimmickness about it. It provides resolution to sound the same way more pixels or larger film gauges provide more resolution to image. How someone mixes their film is entirely up to them. Dolby Atmos takes into account the theatre's geometry and where speakers are located relative to the object that is being moved about, 7.1 does not. The 7.1 performance in a short fat theatre is very different than the one in a long-skinny theatre. 5.1 is more uniform from theatre to theatre than 7.1, as a result. The particulars of the room shape don't affect the result as much as they do on 7.1. Naturally, Mono Surround cares the least about room shape but all surround/effects is fed to all locations, losing all sense of directionality aside from it not being on screen.
The most gimmicky part of Dolby Atmos is the Top Surrounds, as are MOST "height" channels. How people hear is extremely biased towards lateral changes (that is how ears are placed) so vertical changes will be perceived differently by different people, mostly due to posture. I suppose, if one is trying to create an "outdoors" feel to the soundtrack, having the top surrounds, as a unit, can help convey that in conjunction with the side surrounds. I was in a recent screening where some creative person used the surrounds to move a pressure wave back (after an explosion) so one got a sense of the explosion rather than just the big "boom" that a 5.1/7.1 track would provide. At present, LC/RC are only used on Dolby Atmos mixes (even though they can be mixed directly on channels 9/10 of the AES tracks). I've always been a proponent of LC/RC as 3 screen channels have very obvious (to me) gaps between the speakers. That is extremely apparent in IMAX theatres and always have been.
You might remember David Griesinger from Boston (MIT), and his thorough research of human hearing related transfer functions. As I remember the results, to make it short, our main focus is biased lateral frontwards in an area of +/- 55 degrees off center, may even be 45°. Anything else triggers the brain to turn your head. And basicly, you hear a sound, where you can see it. That's why visible surround speakers are a bad idea, the closet one you can see becomes origin of the sound.
At the end of his research a proposed sound system consisted of 5 front speakers, to give everyone in a room the conductor's perspective. Furthermore 4 surround groups, and optional height channels on the sides were proposed. Another very important factor were two decorrelated LFE groups, as there seems to be some important information in the low frequency end, that a single group could not recreate.
The importance of 5 screen channels was known since research done in the 1940s and 50s, and used in Cinerama and Todd AO sound systems. 3 channels were a cheap copy cat solution for the scrooge exhibitor focused on budget.
It was also shown, that an ordinary 2.0 channel or 3.2.1 channel sound source could very well be "decoded" to drive the sound and will create stunning results.
The Griesinger sound systems do exist, most modern automobiles come with a surround system based on this research, started by Harman automotive sound in the 90's. There are 2 LF speakers in the doors, and 5 (invisible) speakers in the dashboard and beams. Plus 4 room groups. The car is among the worst possible location to listen to stereo music, no seat can be ideal. The DSP based surround does a very fine job on recreating an immersive feeling for the driver and passengers.
The research also became the basis for the development of immersive theatre systems. From the human hearing mechanism, a 7.1 system is as good as you can get for normal sound mixes. Anything above that requires specific mixing technologies, which depend on each individual's hearing capability and are not really predictable in the result for a large group of listeners.
The better impact lies in the use of dynamics, and a full low frequency end, which shakes the seats, not a motorized rattle seat.
It was also shown, that an ordinary 2.0 channel or 3.2.1 channel sound source could very well be "decoded" to drive the sound and will create stunning results.
With modern DSPs, it's pretty straight forward to determine the virtual position of a sound panned in between two speakers and route it to a real speaker for example. It's actually a function present on many AVRs. For the professional cinema market, those solutions remain a bit elusive. So, investing in 5 front channels is something that just gets very little return, unless you also invest in something like Atmos.
Maybe the advent of stuff like Q-Sys may increase the usefulness of 5 stage-speaker setups, once somebody develops plugins that can improve audio extraction for those two extra speakers.
It works...O-K. I tested it with 5 unique sounds and it does put them in the right place but there is some bleeding on it. However, within a unified mix, you wouldn't notice it. The realities are, for movies, you are not going to get a mix that is trying to phantom LC/RC. You are going to get a hard-center dialog with music/effects out of Left/Right. They are not going to mix for channels that are not there. In Dolby Atmos, they can/will because the system knows what speakers are present and will recreate what they heard on the dubbing stage. So, if you were to do a spread mix within a DSP like Q-SYS, don't expect to see dialog show up in those channels. You might get music or effects to blend in over there but rarely are people noticing that music/effects have gaps in the sound stage as they are, typically, not as localized unless they do a pan where say a car drives from left-to-right...then it is apparent that there are just 3 speakers and when the car leaves the screen, there is nowhere for its sound to go so it stays on right. Dolby Atmos, with RW1...can give an audio source that is just off screen.
Yeah, I know about the Active Matrix Surround Decoder and I've also built a "3-5 Spreading" option, which I've tested in our screening room.
The results aren't all that great though, but as you indicated, it's probably not so much because of the bleed you get by just "averaging" two channels into one, but the fact that most movie mixes are rather straight-forward, where the dialog is in the center, the music is in L+R and it's just the odd sound effect that needs to get panned around that actually would benefit from this, and in object-based audio, the necessary information for a "100% discrete" rendering is already present...
I'm pretty disappointed by most modern sound mixes. Despite all the technical possibilities, many of them are just obnoxiously loud and simply lazily put together. I guess the last mix that really got me excited was that of Gravity and that's an almost 10-year old movie... I also still clearly remember Children of Men (2006 and also an Alfonso Cuarón movie), which also put effects exactly where they happened, including the dialog... unfortunately, that movie never got an 8-channel SDDS release, I guess because SDDS was already considered a failed format by 2006.
Harman had a system that took a 5.1 or 7.1 mix and upmixed it to 24 channels, I think. Very fancy DSP work. I think it was also sold into automotive. We did some work on that and had it in a local theater for testing.
I also remember watching a scene from the Sound of Music (during an ISDCF plugfest) where dialog ATTEMPTED to follow people on the screen. It was a very jarring left only, right only, or center only signal as different people spoke.
I'm pretty sure, my 3-5 spread mix uses three pro logic decoders and a mixer/leveler to get it all correct. Again, my final test was 5 discrete sounds that had to come out of the right "hole" and they did but if you soloed channels you could hear bleed.
As for panned dialog and The Sound of Music...I'm VERY familiar with that mix and if you had 5-screen channels, it should not have been very jarring at all. If you had 3-screen channels, you had holes in your sound stage. I don't know what they did for the 4-track mix-down but the 70mm 6-track mix was one of the best, ever. There was a lot of LC/RC information for dialog. When there were three actors on the screen, they each got a speaker.
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