I know this has been done to death here and in other areas. Yes there is heaps of info on this from Dolby and some very good info in the Doom9 forum.
I mostly understand it, and it's certainly a lot to get the brain around but I've never been one to shy away from doing the hard yards.
However most of the information I feel doesn't really relate to what most of us here are on about. I suspect not that many VV users are mixing audio for cinema release. Basically were producing soundtracks in VV that are already normalised for listening in the average home. All the complexities of handling a huge dynamic range just aren't on our horizon.
We've got our audio where we want it and basically are encoding to ac3 simply to go onto a DVD in the most efficient way possible i.e. leave more room for the video. Any audio tracks that have too much dynamic range we've probably already compressed.
So what we want to do is really quite simple, encode our PCM soundtrack to ac3 withour anything happening to it, no more compression, we just want it to come out the same as if we used a PCM track on the DVD.
Now I'd be prepared to invest some time in this to work it out BUT unlike playing around with the audio in VV running tests on ac3 is very tedious. There is no way to do this in real time and no objective way to monitor the ouput. I could setup a DVD player with meters but that's a lot of work, it means I've got to encode, burn a DVD and then try it in the player, tweak a few things and repeat.
I could live with waiting for the encode but not being able to bring the encoded file back into VV at least to see / hear how it is is a pain. I understand that ac3 is only an output format but it would be mighty handy to know what its got in it.
This issue is further clouded by some suggestion that the preview in DVDA doesn't do a proper ac3 decode so perhaps even there we don't really get to preview our soundtrack.
I know this really shold have been posted under VV audio or AC3 encoder but:
a) Not to many of us read those boards.
b) I suspect this is of interest to most of the VV users.
I mostly understand it, and it's certainly a lot to get the brain around but I've never been one to shy away from doing the hard yards.
However most of the information I feel doesn't really relate to what most of us here are on about. I suspect not that many VV users are mixing audio for cinema release. Basically were producing soundtracks in VV that are already normalised for listening in the average home. All the complexities of handling a huge dynamic range just aren't on our horizon.
We've got our audio where we want it and basically are encoding to ac3 simply to go onto a DVD in the most efficient way possible i.e. leave more room for the video. Any audio tracks that have too much dynamic range we've probably already compressed.
So what we want to do is really quite simple, encode our PCM soundtrack to ac3 withour anything happening to it, no more compression, we just want it to come out the same as if we used a PCM track on the DVD.
Now I'd be prepared to invest some time in this to work it out BUT unlike playing around with the audio in VV running tests on ac3 is very tedious. There is no way to do this in real time and no objective way to monitor the ouput. I could setup a DVD player with meters but that's a lot of work, it means I've got to encode, burn a DVD and then try it in the player, tweak a few things and repeat.
I could live with waiting for the encode but not being able to bring the encoded file back into VV at least to see / hear how it is is a pain. I understand that ac3 is only an output format but it would be mighty handy to know what its got in it.
This issue is further clouded by some suggestion that the preview in DVDA doesn't do a proper ac3 decode so perhaps even there we don't really get to preview our soundtrack.
I know this really shold have been posted under VV audio or AC3 encoder but:
a) Not to many of us read those boards.
b) I suspect this is of interest to most of the VV users.