Hi, Peter-
Glad you had a good time - I had a good time putting things together, and hosting.
To answer your questions,
1. Usually, theater surrounds are calibrated to 82dB, to account for the fact that you're feeding an array of speakers - Dolby Atmos has changed this to the same calibration level (85dB) as the screen channels, so you can smoothly pan between the screen and any of the surrounds. Also, theater surrounds generally didn't previously produce full-range sound - so there was a major shift between the screen and surround speakers. In that room, we've added extra subs in the rear, with bass management from the surrounds, to take care of that issue. It's true that it's difficult for people to accurately localize sound below about 80 Hertz - but a lot of older surrounds built for cinema don't even reproduce well that low...
2. All of the panning of the sound objects are done in the Dolby Atmos panner plugins that send their pan metadata and timecode straight to the Dolby Atmos RMU (Rendering Mastering Unit) - we're bypassing the Pro Tools panners in this case.
There's a good explanation in the PDF at:
http://www.dolby.com/uploadedFiles/A...for-Cinema.pdf
You can also watch the instructional video we showed at:
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/professio...mos-video.html
The presenter was John
Loose - the manager of our Creative Services department... (Since he's my boss, I'm pretty sure he'd want his name spelled right
)
-Kevin