I'd show you my surround-sound Choir DVD if I knew how

riredale wrote on 12/21/2004, 4:17 PM

Well, most of the project is finished, and I've released a 17-minute clip of the Salzburg portion of the Tour last summer to choir families so they can watch something this Christmas (I'd originally planned to have the whole project finished in time for Thanksgiving, but the surround-sound aspect has been a bit of a time sink).

It's really cool to hear the noon bells of Salzburg in surround, and when the Choir performs in the Mozarteum for the Cantus Music Festival, you can hear the acoustics of the hall and the applause coming from behind you.

But how to demo it? Apparently there is a way in Microsoft's Windows Media to encode surround, but if so, it's not obvious to me in the WM encoder I have downloaded. I can post a clip to the Chienworks site, but then it's only in stereo (sigh).

Comments

SonyTSW wrote on 12/21/2004, 6:48 PM

A Vegas 4.0 or 5.0 surround project supports rendering to Windows Media in surround. You can render to either WMA or WMV with 5.1 audio, just choose the appropriate template (5.1 templates appear in the list only for Vegas surround projects). Or you can create your own custom template, you'll need to set the format on the Audio page to WMA 9 Professional to see 5.1 in the Attributes dropdown.

I'm not sure how to do this in WME, or if it is even possible.

Surround playback from Windows Media Player is supported on WinXP only. Other Windows OS's, such as Win2K, downmix to stereo (Microsoft limitation). 5.1 wma/wmv files show up as stereo when you click on them in the Vegas explorer on Win2K but they will be reported as 5.1 on WinXP. Vegas will load them as stereo on the timeline.

riredale wrote on 12/22/2004, 8:11 AM

Thanks. Silly me, I never considered encoding to WMA inside Vegas. I'll give it a try, and if it works I'll put a clip on the Chienworks site.