PHOTO : COURTESY OF CTV
“ We know the day is coming where we ’ ll be able to support the picture better with more elaborate audio ,” he says – “ either with a wider and taller format , or something that offers a level of personalization for the listener .”
At Bellmedia , he and his team have been experimenting in that regard over the past two years , trying out different things and , as he puts it , “ filing them under , ‘ Be ready to answer the call .’”
He elaborates : “ We know the day is going to come that distributors can support these next-generation formats , and eventually , one of our client partners is going to ask us to do this , and we don ’ t want to wait for that call to figure it out .”
That ’ s how the 2018 iHeartRadio MMVAs broadcast turned into a proof-of-concept initiative for the team – a means of discovering if , when distributors are able to take the signal , they can properly provide it , and also to show clients and collaborators a real-world , visceral experience of what these capabilities could mean for a finished product .
Since early 2018 , Bellmedia has enjoyed a close collaboration with Dolby Laboratories engineers regarding a number of different projects and initiatives . “ And what became clear to us was that , while we ’ ve been playing with high-order surround and surround-plus-height formats for almost two years , with Dolby ’ s help , it would be possible to do this in realtime , in a live setting ,” he shares . “ That sort of changes everything , so we wanted to know if we could do it , see how it works , and understand what the potential penalties might be .”
And so the team from Bellmedia – anchored by Nunan , Production Audio Supervisor Howard Baggley , Post Sound Supervisor David Midgley , and Systems Engineer Sean Corcoran – along with their various technical collaborators for the broadcast , set out on their mission .
In Practice
The core consideration throughout the entire experiment was that , no matter what , they still needed to put a conventional show to air ; thus , the Atmos mix would be a fully-parallel finish , and in addition to proving whether this could be achieved , it would also prove that it could be achieved without a risk to the main show .
“ Luckily , since the architecture of that show is based around a massive router and over MADI , with a small amount of Ravenna thrown in , we knew it ’ d be really easy to just graft another mix stage onto the show apparatus and be totally air-gapped from the rest of the show ,” Nunan explains .
The MMVAs have a history of using a similar “ simultaneous mix ” model . In the early days of HD , when broadcasters were in the preliminary stages of experimentation with 5.1 , the main show mix was done in two-channel stereo , at which point those stems would be sent to another mix room for a 5.1 accompaniment to the HD product . As it happens , the engineer responsible for that surround mix years ago was Baggley , who was behind the live Atmos mix this time around .
While Baggley is one of the most experienced broadcast engineers in the country , the height element was new to him for a live application . Conversely , Midgley has logged plenty of hours mixing in Atmos in post studios , but typically isn ’ t as active with live productions .
“ We worked together to kind of leverage the best of those worlds ,” Midgley explains . “ Howard has mixed a ton of stuff in 5.1 , but this was a bit new to him , so I was there to assist and just give him an idea of ‘ what happens when …’”
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