• Compression Techniques

  Split 5.1 Surround Sound from Compressor

  Posted by Paula Zimmerman on December 9, 2011 at 7:14 am

  Hi,

  I completed a project for a client about a year ago that involved taking a center-panned narration and stereo panned music from Final Cut, exporting it into one stream and setting it up as 3/2 Dolby 5.1 surround sound in Compressor and bringing the result into DVDSP as a single stream. It worked great in that program-narration came from center and music came from all sides. I unfortunately lost my notes on how I did it, since this is the only project I ever did that demanded this. Now, I need to do the exact process again and it isn’t happening in the way I expect and I’ve been through every setting in all 3 programs and am coming out at a loss. My client has Final Cut Pro 5, Compressor 2, and DVDSP 4.

  The steps I’ve done so far:

  I’ve taken the basic 2-channel narration and set the pans to 0
  I’ve set all the music, which is just CD-quality library material (converted to 48k .aiff) to a -1 pan.

  I exported it from FCP through Quicktime as audio only with the NTSC 10-bit uncompressed 48K codec (the footage is BetaSP original, converted through an AJA LA I/O).
  I brought the stream into Compressor and applied the Dolby 5.1 Surround setting with 3/2 parameters (tested both with and without LFE)

  Doing this as a regular audio stream, it comes out with everything center panned when I record to a test DVD.

  Doing it as a surround group and separately assigning the whole stream to each individual surround channel causes everything to be surround, including the narration.

  I haven’t tried using a surround group and not assigning the stream to the center, but I feel like I’ve exhausted all my solutions.

  Am I on the right track with this at all? I know I didn’t create 6 tracks in the previous project, so that’s not it.

  I feel like I’m one click from the solution, but I just need another point of view to see what I’m missing. I’m meeting the client tomorrow and he’s breathing down my neck for a solution, so if you can
  help soon, that would be amazing.

  Thanks for your help.

  Paula Zimmerman replied 14 years, 5 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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