A Filmmakers Guide to Getting Started in Dolby Atmos

We’ll start by Launching Nuendo. Opening the Lesson 01 Project 01 File and the absolute first thing you need to do is make sure your Audio is set to 512 Samples and 48K. Dolby Atmos MUST be set up for that, otherwise it won’t perform. We’ll open the STUDIO SETUP and instantly you see our Audio Driver Setup. Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with Nuendo at this stage. We talk UI as we go along.

In this Lesson, we'll complete the basic setup and start the creation of a Standard Bed which is the foundation of the Dolby Atmos Environment.

In this Lesson, we'll dive into the Dolby Renderer. This is where you can see the interface for Beds and Objects along with the Dolby Visualizer Environment. Our bed has been added to our Dolby Renderer, allowing us to explain the interface. Along the way, we'll talk 7.1.4, Speaker placement and which sounds populate each speaker, and how the .4 in Dolby makes the format shine.

Mixconsole – The mixer in Nuendo comes to the center stage in this Lesson. We'll explore the layout and how it aids in showing the routing tree in Dolby Atmos. We're still working in Stereo at this point, so this Lesson helps to show how much still needs to be accomplished in a visual manner.

In this Lesson, we'll complete our work in the Authoring Tool and I'll introduce my Film Template. In the end, you'll learn why Objects have 128 Channels, with mono taking up 1, Stereo taking up 2. You'll also learn why Beds use 10 Channels in a 7.1.2 Bed so 3 Beds would use 30 Channels, 4, 40, and so on.

We'll finish up our ENVIRONMENT routing by setting up our BINAURAL listening stage. This isn’t a part of the DOLBY ATMOS setup, however since we’re using HEADPHONES, it’s essential to completing our MIX and no matter what program you’re using, right now to hear the immersive mix you need to use a Binaural output send to your Headphones.

In this Lesson, we'll walk thru the process of adding Objects to our Authoring Environment manually. This is a universal workflow and should apply to almost any Dolby Atmos workflow.

So, in this video, we’re going to learn how to add an object through automatic means. Let’s start by selecting a track we want to turn into an object. With that done, let’s launch the ADM again and navigate over to the FUNCTION dropdown and choose CREATE OBJECTS FROM SELECTED TASKS, and voila! The track is added as an Object, Let’s Name it in the EFFECT, assign it to the Effects Group and now we’ll turn on the Automation and hit PLAY.

In this last Lesson, we want to fix one thing with the Mix before we finish so we need to be able to see our levels in the Object mix channels. Now there’s another way to fix this and I’ll show you in the next lesson a better way to achieve this but for right now, let’s use this method. Right Click on the Channel, CHOOSE GLOBAL SETTING>METER POSITION>POST-PANNER, and switch it from POST PANNER to POST FADER.

The problem with this method is though you can now see the Fader, you’ve lost the ability to see the Panner movement on the Channel. We introduce a better workflow in the next session. For now, PLAY your Dolby Atmos session, and we'll see you in the next Lesson.

The Second Lesson contains my custom template which has over 150 Tracks inside! This may be too much for a modest system, especially once plugins are activated. This video shows you how to delete tracks and Save your Template in a reduced track count.

The last part of the video shows the Steinberg plugin substitutions.

Remember, for this lesson we’ll use a Production ready Immersive Template. If you haven’t downloaded it, you can grab the link in the Forum. I’ve included the Template free of charge in the Course. So what you want to do is grab the template and place it in your Template Folder which can usually be found here: C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Nuendo 12_64\Project Templates

In this Lesson, we’re gonna start with a little bit more realistic setup for our film. This will simulate creating your Dolby Atmos project from scratch. Our clips have been edited and I’ve included some Music and some effects.

We've got our template with our assets placed and edited just as we would get it from the Sound Editor or if you did it for yourself the way you would have it once you’ve completed the edit. Now our Output for the purposes of this video is still Stereo. In this video, we’ll LAUNCH the ADM AUTHORING for DOLBY ATMOS and CHOOSE the SETUP ASSISTANT. Now if you’re still using version 11, you don’t have this so you can skip to our next video MANUALLY setting up the DOLBY ATMOS Bus now. Okay so we’re inside the SETUP ASSISTANT and we want to, just like before make sure our Samples are set to 512 and our sample rate is 48k. Once that’s good, we can move to the Renderer. Let’s set our MAINMIX CHANNEL CONFIG to 7.1.4 and we’re going to CHOOSE to TICK the ADD MAIN MIX CHANNEL with RENDERER box as this will automatically set the 7.1.4 Output as our MAIN MIX.

So in this Lesson, we’ve created our 7.1.4 BUS, set up our RENDERER, and prepared ourselves to complete the routing in the MIXCONSOLE. Next, I’ll show you how to set up the 7.1.4 BUS Manually.

In the previous video, we set up our 7.1.4 Environment by using Nuendo’s Dolby Atmos Setup Assistant. In this video, we’ll do it manually. This is how it was accomplished in versions previous to Nuendo 12 and the workflow most programs use to set up Dolby Atmos so it’s helpful to learn. We'll show why doing the Immersive or Surround Mix first and then prepping a Down Mix for 5.1 and Stereo should be the correct way, never the other way around.

We‘ll next complete our 7.1.4 speaker setup and your listening stage – Your all set here, nothing left to do. If you plan to use Binaural, there's more work to do. Next, we’ll work in the MIX CONSOLE and AUDIO CONNECTIONS to set up our BINURAL listening Environment.

In this Lesson, we'll complete our manual setup of the Dolby Atmos Environment. This means invoking our Dolby Atmos Renderer and cleaning up our channel Group positioning in the Mixconsole. Lastly, we'll complete setting up the Renderer by choosing the Renderer in the ADM Authoring Environment.

In this Lesson, we’re going to finish up our ENVIRONMENT routing by setting up our BINAURAL listening stage. This isn’t a part of the DOLBY ATMOS setup, however since we’re using HEADPHONES, it’s essential to completing our MIX and no matter what program you’re using, right now to hear the immersive mix you need to use a Binaural output send to your Headphones.

Next, we'll discuss and work with the 3rd ORDER AMBISONICS CHANNEL and lastly, we'll complete setting up our Binaural Environment.

In this Lesson, we'll take a slight Detour from our Atmos Setup to talk about the 3rd Order Ambisonics decoder in NUENDO. Using it to monitor our immersive mix with Stereo Headphones and the Ambidecoder will help us do just that. We'll go into depth about HRTF, Ear Profile configuration, Headphone Matching, Head Tracking (using tracking devices mounted to the Headphone to listen from different angles)

Lastly, I show you how to apply a curve that linearizes your Headphones' profile. Using Headphone Match helps to trust the Mix while mobile if for instance, you are working in an Airport or Hotel room. As always, I’d never suggest you approve your Mix by mixing with Headphones, a proper Speaker Mix is essential, but Headphone Match gets you a large way there and your Neighbors will thank you.

In this Lesson, we're ready to create some BEDS!

We'll begin by determining how many BEDS we need. In the First Lesson, we created just one Standard Bed, here we want to create multiple Custom Beds for our Dialogue, Music, and for our Effects, and Foley.

In this Lesson, we'll customize our individual tracks, panning our content in the sound field. This will give our Custom Beds some diversity.

In our next Lesson, we'll add multiple Custom Objects to our Renderer, and do some outrageous Panning in order to highlight our Mix.

In this lesson, we will export our mix to the Dolby Standard file format, ADM for import into our finishing platform.

In this lesson, we'll import the ADM file into Resolve, set up our Project for Dolby Atmos by enabling the Dolby Atmos Renderer and use the Panner to fix our Dialogue Bed.

In our final Lesson, we dive into the Deliver Page and describe how our film could be output for a Streaming Platform.