That's something they'd likely leave to a third party plugin. That's the approach Avid took. It would be nice for Vegas to have something like that.

"Dolby licensing is expensive"

So are the hardware components. In excess of $100k I would imagine, based on the cost of pro stereo and 5:1 monitors. The room is an additional expense... probably twice the cost of the system hardware.

Great to see you still lurking here, @rraud !

What is the intended playback source for this Dolby Atmos?

From Wiki:

"Dolby Atmos technology allows up to 128 audio tracks plus associated spatial audio description metadata (most notably, location or pan automation data) to be distributed to theaters for optimal, dynamic rendering to loudspeakers based on the theater capabilities. Each audio track can be assigned to an audio channel, the traditional format for distribution, or to an audio "object." Dolby Atmos by default, has a 10-channel 7.1.2 bed for ambience stems or center dialogue, leaving 118 tracks for objects.[5]

Dolby Atmos home theaters can be built upon traditional 5.1 and 7.1 layouts. For Dolby Atmos, the nomenclature differs slightly: a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos system is a traditional 7.1 layout with four overhead or Dolby Atmos enabled speakers."

The original theater channel designs I thought we going to be like 22 speakers, making Atmos like 7.1.14.

The main difference from what I can see for Vegas additions, is the upgrade to E-AC3 codec. Then adding to the surround mixing mode to incorporate the functions for the meta data and extra channels.

I would imagine if there is enough demand Magix might add it. But back when 5.1 was added to Vegas, DVD was the main distribution format that supported 5.1 and made it an interesting/marketable feature. There is probably little pressure to release an upgrade to DVD-A to support the 4K Ultra DVD.

Today, even most on this forum, have little idea of what MPEG-DASH is much less how to encode or host it. Youtube and Vimeo do not support 5.1 or 7.1, and downmix all to 2 channel.

Video containers like.MXF already support a very large number of uncompressed audio tracks. Getting your system to playback, and map the correct channels to speakers is the real issue here. Vegas supports MXF.

The industry standard .MP4 container only supports AC-3, so we would need a new standard to be supported on a wide variety of devices. Vegas currently supports AC-3, and the video codec/resolutions. FFMPEG can more than likely combine the two files.

Dolby E-AC3 is just an upgrade to codec bandwidth and support for more channels. AC-3 was pretty much just multi channel MP3, designed to fit more audio on disc so there was more room for video.

Hopefully there is also a team working on audio at Magix, and not just a team working on video decompression with NVENC.

Avid Pro Tools already has Dolby Atmos functionality. So you might need a Saw and a Hammer.

Great to see you still lurking here, @rraud !

@MV, You bet my friend. I post more comments and such on the Vegas Audio and Sound Forge pages, but there's a lot less activity than there was on the SCS audio pages