How are you using your channels in 5.1 mixes for TV

Question

I'm curious how other people are using their channels in creating mixes for television. We've just incorporated 5.1 encoding capabilities in both Dolby Digital and Dolby-E into our workflow in the last year, and we've adopted something similar to the Discovery networks' spec. Here's what we're doing.

The only thing we're putting in the center channels is narration and/or dialogue. If we want to put something else in the middle, we're using a phantom center. Surrounds we reserve primarily for reverb returns from the music and for ambiences. We try to keep most of our activity in the front though. So, if we have an ambience that gets a little busy or distracting coming from the rear channels, we'll move or remove it entirely.

I should mention that we're mostly working on documentaries and docu-dramas, and we do a lot of our sales overseas. That played a large role in the decisions we made. How are you using the surround sound-field, and what factors are feeding your decisions for those choices?

Answer 1

I have been working very similarly, but that's due to the vast majority of my work being Discovery and National Geographic Film/TV whose QC spec regarding 5.1 are damn near identical. I must say though that in hearing my mixes broadcast, I've become quite disappointed with the surrounds as reverb returns only and have begun using those surround panners as they were originally intended. I have yet to have had music delivered in 5.1 so those reverb returns are still in place, but amb and sfx are starting to get built up more in surround rather than pushed through a verb.

For those who don't know and are in awe of the blasphemous possibility of omitting everything but voice from the discrete center channel, it's in place as an efficiency procedure. Because the vast majority of Discovery and NGTV gets re-broadcast in multiple nations around the world they find it extremely easy to strip out the center channel and insert the new language narration. We have been trying to educate the post-sups that we work with on the benefits of mixing with a discrete center channel vs the phantom center, and how we could get around this perceived cost savings through revisiting the delivery requirements for shows. But it's a long standing beast that has proven results, and probably won't die anytime soon. If you have recommendations for our fight I'd love to hear them.