Introduction to Atmos and Dolby Renderer setup

- [Instructor] So what is Dolby Atmos anyways? Essentially, Dolby Atmos is a spatial mixing format that doesn't use a fixed set of speakers, at least not in the way that 5.1 and 7.1 have in the past. And if you are not familiar with five and 7.1, these are the speaker configurations generally used in like a movie theater or in your friend's dad's living room when they got surround sound with their DVD player back in the day. The way that Dolby Atmos works is it assumes that we have a certain set of speakers. There is a sort of minimum number of speakers for an actual Dolby Atmos set up. We can see the visualization of the listener here in the space but what we do is we actually have individual sets of audio, individual channels, and we can see those here, they're up to 128, and essentially each of those channels has a set of data that comes with it that tells the renderer, this is the Dolby Atmos renderer, where to put it within the space. And if it sounds complicated, it is. But I have many ways of cutting past that and sort of thinking in terms of, "Well, how does it sound?" "How can we create the best musical experience?" For the purposes of this course, we'll be talking about listening with headphones because this is a very common way for people to get started mixing in Atmos. It works for a lot of people to an extent. I can't say that you could do a whole career just working on headphones, but it certainly is a great place to start. I still highly recommend getting into a studio if you can. Let's start with the Dolby Atmos renderer here. With conventional DAWs such as Pro Tools, we are actually monitoring through Pro Tools and generally straight into our audio interface. That is not the case when we're monitoring Dolby Atmos. We're going to install the Dolby Atmos renderer. You can find all of this on the Dolby Atmos website. And once you register, you should have installed the Dolby Atmos renderer as well as the Dolby Audio Bridge. And that's going to be the interface between Pro Tools and the Dolby Atmos renderer, at least one of them. So once we have the renderer installed here, I'm going to go up here and look at the preferences. And in the driver section, I'm going to choose core audio. And the input device I'm going to be using is the Dolby Audio Bridge. So this is actually going to be the interface that you're choosing in Pro Tools as well for the output. So that's how they're going to talk to each other, at least in terms of audio. Now, the output device that you choose here in the Atmos renderer is actually where you're going to be hearing things. Now, this gets more complicated when we start talking about an actual Atmos setup with speakers, but since we're in headphones, you're just going to choose your headphone output. I highly recommend for the purposes of this course to use a nice pair of open backed headphones. In this course, you're going to be listening to the binaural output of the Dolby Atmos renderer which is what I listen to when I'm mixing in headphones. Basically, with a nice pair of open backed headphones, the technology has gotten to a place that you can really hear what you're doing in a very substantial way and you can do some really good work. Also, it's worth pointing out that most of the audience for spatial mixes, whether it's on Apple Music or elsewhere, are listening on headphones that are equipped with spatial audio. So for my audio output device I'm going to choose where I'm going to be listening with my headphones. In this case, it's screen flick loop back because we are recording this audio. We're sort of hijacking it with that. But just choose your interface here wherever your headphones get plugged in. The LTC Input Channel, I like set to 129. We're going to talk about that a little bit later but keep that in mind. I'm going to switch it to headphone only mode here. What that does is it simplifies certain settings within the Dolby Atmos renderer and so you don't have to worry about all of the speaker things like that because there are a lot of preferences for speakers when you're setting up a room as you might imagine. The routing one and two is the default. I would imagine that's the way you want it. Frame rate, this is something that's important because Pro Tools also needs to be on the same frame rate so make sure that your sessions are at the frame rate that you choose here. I like to stick with 24. That's just the way that I format things. And then the sample rate you choose either needs to be 48 or 96. I'm generally working at 48 because a lot of the stuff that I get is 44.1 and so I just up sample it a little bit. You can work at 96. If you were somewhere closer, it's totally up to you but the audio that you work with must be in 48 or 96 as the sample rate. Now, if we go over through some more of these preferences you'll see that some of them are grayed out because we've chosen headphone only mode. Output limiting is nice because we just have a ton of audio coming through with all of these channels, as you might imagine. And going into the binaural, just make sure that you don't blow your cans off. Speakers, something we don't have to worry about. If we go to headphone, we're going to choose binaural for the render mode so that we're listening to the best possible representation of the spatial audio that we can get here. And then let's go down to loudness. We're going to keep the loudness measurement on and then remote clients we're going to check in with a little bit later because we need Pro Tools to talk to the renderer in a couple of different ways and we'll get to those when we get there. I'm going to hit accept. It's going to reload my driver as you can see down the bottom left. And the basic layout of this screen is really simple. We have all of our channels over here. You'll see more about that once we actually have audio running through it. We have a meter here for our binaural listening. I'm going to leave the loudness measurements on Dolby Atmos and not binaural because when we deliver audio to streaming services, these are the measurements that we're actually going to use to make sure that we are in the right place. Up at the top, we have a couple of different choices that we don't really need to worry about right now. I have the clocking turned on, so that stays synced with Pro Tools. I have the source as the input because the Dolby Atmos renderer is not only an interface, if you will, a monitoring interface for us, an encode or decode or however you want to look at it, it can also be a player, so if you have some high quality Atmos formatted waves, you can load them in here and listen to those just as raw audio if you open them and that's when we'll be able to click on that master option there. Aside from that, we have a visual representation over here and then up top, we just have attenuation of our mix. If we want to turn it down for whatever reason, we can dim or mute things. And then over here on the right hand side we have a binaural configuration. If you go to the Dolby website and you search for PHRTF, this has recently come out of beta as of when we're recording this, and essentially what we can do is create a binaural configuration that matches literally the shape of your head. So this is an app that will scan the shape of your head so that you are getting the best possible recreation of the spatial field in your headphones. Once again, this works best with a nice pair of open backed headphones. You'll still be able to hear a lot of what we're doing on headphones of a different pedigree but I highly recommend getting a hold of a pair especially if you're doing actual mixing. I'm going to leave my binaural configuration off and I'm going to leave it on default because you all are going to be listening with me. But once we have all of these things set up the Dolby Atmos renderer is ready to go.