DTS or Dolby Media Producer for Blu-Ray

[DarthFader777]

Is anyone encoding for Blu-Ray and if so what are you going with to encode Audio. Currently, I'm using Dolby 569 and 564 which I know will work for Blu-Ray. Since we are looking to upgrade and possibly begin tracking everything at 96Khz I need to condsider DTS and Dolby.
All thoughts welcome,
Thanks

[quadraphonics]

I do a good bit of Blu-Ray encoding, and have for a few years now. I use both DTS-MA and the Dolby Media Producer suite. Both have their pros and cons. The lossless encodes (Master Audio/TrueHD) will both sound worlds better than the 569/564 combo (which I have also used) and the faster than real time encoding is a blessing. It really comes down to your client and what they want. For What It Is Worth, the Film world seems to be split between TrueHD and DTS-MA for Blu_Ray delievries. However, many consumers and review sites have been requesting that compaines like Sony and WB drop TrueHD in favor of DTS-MA.


Randall

[hummerZ]

The DTS encoding software package is also significantly cheaper, IIRC.

For a complete authoring solution for both DVD and BD, I would suggest Dolby. But since you already have the 569, I highly recommend that you consider DTS.

[DarthFader777]

Quadrophonics,
Do you upconvert 24Bit/48Khz sessions to 96Khz. Or do you Take that same session (Stems) and encode to the Higher bit rates. I'm wondering about the audible differences of both of these practices.
Thanks,

[quadraphonics]

Originally Posted by DarthFader777

Quadrophonics,
Do you upconvert 24Bit/48Khz sessions to 96Khz. Or do you Take that same session (Stems) and encode to the Higher bit rates. I'm wondering about the audible differences of both of these practices.
Thanks,

I don't take 24/48 and up-convert them to 96khz. This is for two reasons:
1.) The space required to put the audio on the Blu-Ray will increase a lot. Space is already at a premium, even on a BD-50 when you have HD video on it.
2.) I don't believe that there would be any sonce difference between taking a 24/48 session and up-converting it to 96kHz sonically. It would divide the samples differently, but you would still be limited by the weakest link in the chain - in this case originating at 24/48.

I have done tests with the DTS MA and high resolution encodes (3084kbps) and did a phase flip/ cancellation test against the source audio and the resulting encodes. I chose a scene from a film I was working on that had dialog, loud fxs and music. The DTS MA is, as you would expect, a bit for bit copy and cancels perfectly. The High Resolution audio canceled perfectly for the 5.0 of the 5.1. The High resolution encodes, unlike the DTS MA, has a low pass filter on the LFE channel (as does all DTS encodes and most Dolby encodes out side of Lossless encodes) so i heard the difference between the original and the low pass filtered LFE.

Hope that helps.

Randall