No Option For Encoding in 5.1 Surround

[Jake22]

I have ulead dvd movie factory 6 plus and I'm trying to encode video in stereo 2.0 to dvds in 5.1 surround. When I select the audio format, I choose Dolby Digital Audio. But next to the audio type it only says 2/0(L,R) and 3/2(L,C,R,SL,SR). It doesn't give me the option for 5.1 surround. On the Internet, it said that movie factory 6 plus intelligently divides stereo 2.0 into 5.1 surround, but I don't know why it won't show up as an option when I import 2.0 stereo video. Help!

[Ron P.]

I might be mistaken on this, but.. isn't Dolby 3/2 one in the same as 5.1 surround? There are 5-channels, L, C, R, SL, SR.

[Jake22]

Where's the subwoofer? That's the ".1" in 5.1 surround.

[DVDDoug]

First, you don't gain much by up-mixing from 2.0 to 5.1. Any home-theater receiver has a variety of surround modes in addition to Pro Logic movie decoding. It's usually best to let the receiver do the upmixing at playback time. (I'm not sure if "intelligent" means that you're getting true Pro Logic decoding from a Pro Logic mix.) Additionally, 6-channels take more space on the disc (if you want to mantain quality), and Dolby AC3 is lossy compression and it's considered "bad practice" to transcode from lossy-to-lossy. (You probably won't hear any quality loss... IMO Dolby usually sounds great!)

Now, there are a couple of good reasons for doing it.... If you want to take full control of the surround and you don't want the viewer to mess with the surround modes, 5.1 can do that... All 5.1 channels are under your control and every viewer/listener will experience the same surround mix (assuming they have a 5.1 system, of course).

Or, you can create your own surround mix. I've taken a mono concert recording and panned the sounds into 6 separate WAV files and mixed/faded/filtered these channels independently. (i.e. I made rear-channel applause tracks, etc.) I didn't do this with Movie Factory... I used an audio editor and a few other tools. Of course, you can't un-mix a recording... You can't isolate the guitar and move it to the left speaker, but you can pan, filter, time-shift, etc., after you have 6 separate files.

Where's the subwoofer? That's the ".1" in 5.1 surround.

You don't need it! Hang on... This gets confusing, but the "point-one" channel is not exactly the "subwoofer channel".

From the DVD-production point of view... The point-one channel is the LFE (Low Frequency Effects) channel. i.e. it's the "booms" & "explosions channel". The other 5 channels contain all of the "regular bass". When you play a 5.1 track on a 2-channel stereo system, the 5 main channels are mixed-down to 2, but the LFE is lost. This means that some "boom" & "explosion" sounds must be included in the main channels or the movie won't sound right on a stereo system.*

From the playback system point of view... In a real movie theater or a high-end home theater, the subwoofer is used only for the LFE channel. The other 5 speakers are full-range speakers capable of reproducing bass, and all of the regular bass from the 5 channels goes directly to the 5 speakers.

But, most normal home theater systems have smaller surround speakers that can't reproduce bass. So, the receiver has bass management that's normally configured to send all of the bass from all 6 channels to the subwoofer. When you play a 2-channel stereo track, or a 5.0 track, all of the bass gets sent to the subwoofer.




* There's a rumor that they forgot to do this when they mixed Jurassic Park, and when you watch it on a 2-channel system there is no "boom" when the dino footsteps are supposed to be shaking the ground! (I don't have that movie so I can't confirm it.)