When you say “Atmoskeeps itself exclusive to the big guns”, you’re basically ignoring what Erik said above.
In a cinema - NOT a home environment - the screen can be up to 25 meters wide, the ceiling at 12 meters and screen to back wall could be 30 or 40 meters. Theatrical Atmos is designed to scale to any cinema size, and the number of speakers needed to properly give the audience the immersive sound they paid for by far exceeds what you could have in a small room or home studio.
You want to feel that big studios are trying to keep “it” to themselves? Fine. But at some point you have to acknowledge that a 44 speaker setup in a BIG room will be MUCH closer to the aforementioned cinema than your home studio with a 7.1.4 setup. It’s not a dig at small studios, it’s a fact.
Yes, plenty of people have mixed 5.1 and even 7.1 in small rooms with varying forms of success, and some directors can even be happy with the result. It doesn’t mean that it is possible for large room immersive formats like Atmos, or DTS-X or any other competing system.
Not discounting the advantages of mixing in the dub stage. I’m saying dolby shouldn’t restrict the format only to certified rooms.
If you’re so confident that only big dub stages can do it properly then why not support opening up the format to anyone and let market forces decide the success of the mix. Like DTS-X has. AFAIK you dont have to be certified with certain dimensions etc to deliver in DTS-X.
IMO all it does is hamper the lower/mid budget end of the market. There is already a huge gap between big and small budget films forming, the elite dolby practices just exacerbates it.
If you reply I’d like to hear your comments on the true implications of market forces are and how the industry is more than capable of knowing who does good mixes or not.
Also, 7.1 may not be scaleable like ATMOS or DTS-X but you’d have to include they’ve worked around that issue.
Cinemas without ceiling arrays and the proper setup have a preset that feeds a matrixed up/down mix to suite what the cinema owns.
Not as ideal as ATMOS but it exists everywhere none the less. Most cinemas cant afford ATMOS, ceiling arrays etc.
If they can’t afford ceiling arrays. Then they can’t afford Atmos. And then There is no need for it.
What I meant is that when you own the patent for a tech you choose what to do with it. It’s not really important what you or I think about it.
It’s all just about how can the owner of the patent profit from owning the patent. That is all. It’s just how it is.
If you can’t afford to mix in a proper dub stage then. I don’t think you should be able to do anything more complex than what is available already. But again that is just my opinion and it’s not-important as I don’t make any decision regarding any of it.
I only work and relate to what the current world around us defines as boundaries at this time.
They will change as they have always done.
We did the first DTS digital film in Sweden in 1995, and did that carry a licensing cost? Yes it did.
Eventually a bit later (can’t remember when) we also started doing Dolby SR•D (commonly known as Dolby digital) feature films. We also did the optical transfers to film. It was all expensive. And both competing formats (Sony never became a thing here) carried costs where DTS was the cheaper format but not cheap. If I remember correctly the cost of doing a SRD license and having a Dolby mastering engineer on site was around €10000 and as DTS license was a bit cheaper and they didn’t have mastering engineers travelling around I think the cost was around half of the Dolby cost.
Up until recently the license cost for a Dolby Atmos license and engineer was around the same level, and now there is no cost for the license but only quality requirements for approved studios (and this was always the case for both DTS and Dolby SRD as well).
Also know that when it was still running on 35mm there was the cost of optical transfers and the physical cost of making each copy of celluloid. Those costs have also changed to be a lot less expensive.
So basically it’s cheaper and more accessible today than it ever was to be able to technically produce a possible cinema release. But making feature films was and probably never will be a cheap low cost format of producing entertainment.
If a competing standard emerges then how would it become as successful in promoting compliance of its parameters when your whole argument is basically relying on the exact opposite - that it shouldn’t be a requirement in the first place (for cost reasons)?
Businesses want to make a profit and because of that they’ll see what the best options are. If Disney says it wants the best looking and best sounding product and they want that to translate to theaters and theaters then need those movies to make a profit then it is what it is. Dolby Atmos / Vision is the standard they choose because it is a guarantee of a minimum quality. So the market has spoken.
If you leave all demands behind and just let anyone pick any standard they feel like I can guarantee you that you’ll see a lot of entities say they are conforming to specs but really aren’t. Why? Because:
a) They can, since nobody is “enforcing” the standard, and
b) Because they can increase profits that way
This is bad for content creators because it is bad for the audience.
The above really leads to another point that we should consider which is our place in the industry and the industry’s place as a whole in society.
Theaters are struggling from what I can tell. If we fail to save cinemas then at least we already have Atmos Home which is open to us all with only “recommendations” rather than required certification. But if we want to save them surely giving up on whatever guarantee we have of quality seems like a bad idea to me.
As for our place in the market as a whole I would say that it makes perfect sense to actually lock off a part of the market to the high end in order to maintain at least some structure that encourages or even requires spending more money on audio post. Why? Because that money is what’s going into our pockets one way or another. The cheaper it gets for production the less money goes to audio post. This is not what we want.
I understand the argument that “Oh well, if a mix engineer screws it up then they won’t get more work so the market will take care of it”, but the problem is that nobody wants to risk money that way. So the solution to risking money is to get some sort of “guarantee” of quality.