maxmercy Posted January 21, 2016 Report Share Posted January 21, 2016 Sicario - Dolby Digital 5.1 (Lion's Gate cheapness strikes again) Level - 2 Stars (105.59dB composite) Extension - 3 Stars (16Hz) Dynamics - 5 Stars (32.02dB!) Execution - TBA Overall - TBA Notes - Zero clipping, and no detectable compression or limiting on waveform analysis. Can't wait to see this one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infrasonic Posted January 21, 2016 Report Share Posted January 21, 2016 This movie was excellent. It's in Atmos too! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SME Posted January 22, 2016 Report Share Posted January 22, 2016 So is this one of those "high headroom" Atmos mixes? It's interesting how it's been totally hit or miss with these as to whether there's unusually high headroom or is unusually loud. I suspect the industry is struggling with their established "made for the home mix" practices. I'm willing to bet that Atmos mixes generally demand a lot more headroom for the same loudness level without severely degrading the sound quality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lgans316 Posted January 22, 2016 Report Share Posted January 22, 2016 But this track doesn't seem to be loud as per the numbers posted above? 16 Hz is the best my sub can do. So looks like this mix will be on the sweet spot for me. I bet tbe figures will be identical even with the lossless encode. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infrasonic Posted January 22, 2016 Report Share Posted January 22, 2016 So is this one of those "high headroom" Atmos mixes? It's interesting how it's been totally hit or miss with these as to whether there's unusually high headroom or is unusually loud. I suspect the industry is struggling with their established "made for the home mix" practices. I'm willing to bet that Atmos mixes generally demand a lot more headroom for the same loudness level without severely degrading the sound quality. 100% false. Atmos has nothing to do with a mix being good or bad or having or not having "headroom". Absolutely nothing to do with any of that. Nothing. The unfortunate fact that many Atmos mixes have been compressed or whatever wrong has more to do with the practices of LOUD than Atmos itself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rowan611 Posted January 22, 2016 Report Share Posted January 22, 2016 Just picked this up. Hoping to watch it either tonight or tomorrow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maxmercy Posted January 23, 2016 Author Report Share Posted January 23, 2016 The rental disc is 5.1 DD, Like previous Lion'sGate releases, cannot say anything about the ATMOS mix until it is measured, but I prefer the technical presentation of an unclipped mix. Easy to turn up. Impossible to get back the data clipped away by a careless application of output gain. JSS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shredhead Posted January 23, 2016 Report Share Posted January 23, 2016 This is Fatshaft's graph. I wonder why such a difference? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dgage Posted January 23, 2016 Report Share Posted January 23, 2016 This is Fatshaft's graph. I wonder why such a difference? I was wondering about this or similar when I saw your recent graphs. How are you ensuring the values you are getting are consistent with others when different equipment may be in play? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SME Posted January 23, 2016 Report Share Posted January 23, 2016 100% false. Atmos has nothing to do with a mix being good or bad or having or not having "headroom". Absolutely nothing to do with any of that. Nothing. The unfortunate fact that many Atmos mixes have been compressed or whatever wrong has more to do with the practices of LOUD than Atmos itself. Let me explain my reasoning. In general, there is a compromise to be had between headroom, loudness, and sound quality. You can always have more of any of these two at the expense of the third. How severe the compromise is depends on the particular content. For example in music, a lot less headroom is required to record a solo performer recorded in an acoustically dry space than a symphony orchestra in a large hall for the same loudness and sound quality. Generally, the more "voices" present (and more ambiance, I believe), the more headroom is required for the mix unless some kind of dynamic range reduction is employed or the loudness of the recording is reduced. The more dynamic range is reduced, the harder it is to preserve sound quality. Clipping and compression are both harmful in different ways. I extend this reasoning to argue for why Atmos mixes may need more headroom for the same loudness and sound quality versus mixes that originated as 5.1 or 7.1. AIUI, Atmos for the home encodes the objects by matrixing and down-mixing them into the backward-compatible 7.1 tracks and adding metadata to help the decoder localize the sounds more precisely on the Atmos playback system. I contend that this down-mix requires a lot of headroom to do cleanly, and this in turn demands substantial reductions in either loudness or sound quality. Those mixes that aim to achieve loudness parity with existing home releases are likely to sound worse. More dynamic range reduction will be required than usual. It doesn't help at all that "home" mixes may be frequently done at substantially lower monitor levels than theatrical mixes. I'm guessing -6 dB is fairly typical, and that's a big loss of headroom for any mix. Making matters worse still, theatrical Atmos has far more loudness potential (with the same per-channel headroom) than Atmos at the home, due to the fact that the Atmos objects get "down-mixed" to an array of speaker channels rather than the 7.1 channels on the Blu-ray disc. So movies that were abusively loud to begin with (TF4?) and that are mixed for the home using established methods (-6 dB down?) will tend to sound like garbage at the end of the process. I totally agree that LOUD is the root of the problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shredhead Posted January 23, 2016 Report Share Posted January 23, 2016 I was wondering about this or similar when I saw your recent graphs. How are you ensuring the values you are getting are consistent with others when different equipment may be in play? I have 2 different high quality signal input chains to play with and compare, as well as half a dozen or so different rigs that I've set up for friends. The way I'm running scenes in real-time is different than how Max, Nube and Fat run the PvA's. The most likely reason for the difference in the 2 graphs is that there are 2 different mixes of this movie floating around. Fatshaft noted his graph as a 7.1 Shatmos mix and Max graphed a 5.1 DD mix. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infrasonic Posted January 23, 2016 Report Share Posted January 23, 2016 Let me explain my reasoning. In general, there is a compromise to be had between headroom, loudness, and sound quality. You can always have more of any of these two at the expense of the third. How severe the compromise is depends on the particular content. For example in music, a lot less headroom is required to record a solo performer recorded in an acoustically dry space than a symphony orchestra in a large hall for the same loudness and sound quality. Generally, the more "voices" present (and more ambiance, I believe), the more headroom is required for the mix unless some kind of dynamic range reduction is employed or the loudness of the recording is reduced. The more dynamic range is reduced, the harder it is to preserve sound quality. Clipping and compression are both harmful in different ways. I extend this reasoning to argue for why Atmos mixes may need more headroom for the same loudness and sound quality versus mixes that originated as 5.1 or 7.1. AIUI, Atmos for the home encodes the objects by matrixing and down-mixing them into the backward-compatible 7.1 tracks and adding metadata to help the decoder localize the sounds more precisely on the Atmos playback system. I contend that this down-mix requires a lot of headroom to do cleanly, and this in turn demands substantial reductions in either loudness or sound quality. Those mixes that aim to achieve loudness parity with existing home releases are likely to sound worse. More dynamic range reduction will be required than usual. It doesn't help at all that "home" mixes may be frequently done at substantially lower monitor levels than theatrical mixes. I'm guessing -6 dB is fairly typical, and that's a big loss of headroom for any mix. Making matters worse still, theatrical Atmos has far more loudness potential (with the same per-channel headroom) than Atmos at the home, due to the fact that the Atmos objects get "down-mixed" to an array of speaker channels rather than the 7.1 channels on the Blu-ray disc. So movies that were abusively loud to begin with (TF4?) and that are mixed for the home using established methods (-6 dB down?) will tend to sound like garbage at the end of the process. I totally agree that LOUD is the root of the problem. SME, you're a smart guy. But a bit TOO smart for your own good. You got it down, that's for sure. But I'll tell ya.... this is not the case. Good theory there but inaccurate. A majority of the Atmos movies cataloged here just so happen to be the big, bombastic type mixes and most of them have had lots of compression just because they wanted them to be/sound loud.That's it. Atmos has NOTHING to do with that. There are plenty of good sounding ones that are not compressed to shit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lgans316 Posted January 25, 2016 Report Share Posted January 25, 2016 So a 5.1 track can have tremendous bass but a 7.1.4 must not because it needs more headroom? Really? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infrasonic Posted January 25, 2016 Report Share Posted January 25, 2016 No. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SME Posted January 25, 2016 Report Share Posted January 25, 2016 So a 5.1 track can have tremendous bass but a 7.1.4 must not because it needs more headroom? Really? Not at all. The amount of headroom (peak SPL per channel) in the track is chosen by the mixer based on the monitoring level he or she selects before doing the mix. Even a mono track can have "tremendous bass" if it's monitored and played back at a high enough level (and the playback system is up to the task). Note that it doesn't make sense to talk about a 7.1.4 track, even though it appears some titles may advertise "7.1.4" simply because they were monitored on a "7.1.4" playback system. The soundtrack for Atmos home mixes is really only 7.1. The objects are encoded via matrixing with metadata that allows the decoder to lift the objects out of the mix so that they can be rendered on the playback system, which could be 7.1.4 or whatever. For the same amount of per-channel headroom a 7.1 track actually has more potential for bass than a 5.1 track does because there are more channels available that can contain bass. However, a theatrical Atmos track has even more potential compared to a standard 7.1 because each of the objects can contain bass that gets bass-managed to the appropriate subs (front or surround) in the playback venue. The problem comes when it's time to down-mix, that is, recreate the same soundtrack using fewer channels. Assuming the original track had one or more channels hitting digital full-scale (not at all unusual), either the down-mix will require more headroom (and a higher monitoring/playback level) or else some combination of compression, limiting, or clipping must be used to make the waveform fit. This is already a problem when down-mixing from 7.1 to 5.1 and may explain why often the 5.1 track has a bass filter where the 7.1 track does not. For a theatrical Atmos track which has 7.2 (IIRC) beds plus over hundred simultaneous objects, the problem is much greater. One might ask at this point what this has to do with loudness. Very roughly speaking, loudness correlates with sound power. If a sound is played in more than one channel at once, it is roughly true that the average SPL and sound power (and hence loudness) increase by 3 dB. By mixing the sound into each channel at a level of -3 dB, the same loudness is achieved as by playing at 0 dB through one channel, but the peak SPL still goes up by 3 dB. If those channels get down-mixed to one, then the peak SPL required of that channel is still 3 dB higher. So in other words, the more channels you have to begin with, the more peak SPL required in each channel for the down-mix, even for a soundtrack having the same loudness. A majority of the Atmos movies cataloged here just so happen to be the big, bombastic type mixes and most of them have had lots of compression just because they wanted them to be/sound loud.That's it. Atmos has NOTHING to do with that. There are plenty of good sounding ones that are not compressed to shit. I realize this is a very confusing subject, which is why my argument has been misunderstood so far. To the extent that what Infrasonic here says is true (and I don't disagree), the original theatrical Atmos mix is already compressed quite a bit and made to sound loud. And these kind of mixes suffer *even more* when down-mixed to 7.1 (for Atmos @ home) with 3 or 6 dB less headroom per channel than the theatrical reference. If the original mix was not so loud to begin with, then the down-mix might have only a few peaks that exceed full-scale that need to be compressed or limited. The sound quality impact may be quite monitor. However, for a mix that was highly compressed to begin with, a lot more content is going to be pushing above full-scale and the compression and limiting will have to be much more aggressive to keep it contained. Hence, the down-mix will sound worse than either a "quiet" Atmos mix or a "loud" 7.1 theatrical mix. Note that we should expect this problem to be there whether or not the "home release" was done in Atmos, as long as the original theatrical track was done in Atmos. Simply because the original mix was prepared for systems with much higher *total headroom* (taking all channels and objects into account), the sound quality in the down-mixes will tend to suffer more for these unless the headroom is increased by choosing a higher monitoring level (and requiring home viewers to turn up the master volume more to achieve parity with other content). Whether or not the studios want their home mixes to sound like clipped garbage is not clear. We are told that the director "signs off" on the home mix, but that doesn't mean that the severe clipping that turns up is necessarily desired. This issue is complicated by the likelihood that mixers are monitoring home mixes with substandard equipment that may not be up to the task of accurately reproducing the mix even at at the lower monitoring levels typically used. It may not be possible for either the director or mixers to critically evaluate what they've done. OTOH, I see some evidence that "home mixes" are starting to fall out of favor in some cases, partly evidenced by the number of recent home releases (e.g. "Avengers 2") that sound "a lot quieter". (Another piece of evidence is a comment posted by FilmMixer on AVS, sadly deleted a few hours later, that suggested "about 60%" of his recent contracts have included near-field mixes). Most likely "Avengers 2" wasn't intended to be 8 dB less loud but instead we got the theatrical mix instead of a home mix. Or those mixers realized what I'm saying above about headroom with Atmos and opted to not abide by "the (not publicly available) standard" for home mixes that says they should be done with monitoring level 6 dB (or whatever) lower. All I'm saying is that there is a very real technical reasons why an Atmos home-mix will likely sound worse than a home mix done from 5.1/7.1 original content unless the monitoring level used for the mix is increased. Those mixes that are done to existing standards will sound like trash, but mixes done by studios who actually listen and note that their mix-downs sound like ass will opt to push the monitoring level up, the result of which is cleaner more dynamic mixes that require the home viewer to turn the MV up a bit more than usual. That's it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rowan611 Posted January 27, 2016 Report Share Posted January 27, 2016 Just finished it. Excellent movie. The score is one of the best scores I've heard in a long time. John Wick was the last score that impressed me. This was.....intense, Jaws intense. Man, I missed some good movies last year. Between this and Everest (another intense movie)..... I voted 5 and buy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shredhead Posted January 28, 2016 Report Share Posted January 28, 2016 Max, have you changed the settings recently for the PvA's? Look at the difference in resolution for the peak files of yours compared to Fatshaft's: Difference in the content aside, Fatshaft's seems to show more detail in the peaks? Looking at your PvA for MoS looks like it has the higher resolution: I'm not asking you to re-do this movie because I don't really care about it at all. Just wondering why you changed things up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maxmercy Posted January 29, 2016 Author Report Share Posted January 29, 2016 I have never changed anything with the FFT settings after the first year or so. The original thread detailed the FFT length choice for capturing transient levels vs freq resolution. I settled on a 1Hz bin width (we used to measure Level/Dynamics with area under the Peak and Average curves until we could measure actual summed 7.1 signal strength digitally). nube liked the slightly narrower bin width, and adjusts the overall level on is graphs to equate to the 1Hz bin width level. Fatshaft may be using nube's settings. Nube essentially ran all the measurements for almost 2 years, and probably suffered some burnout doing so (I can't blame him for taking a break from the forums). I may need to measure the retail BD on this. I am deciding whether or not the movie is good enough to buy (re-watch-ablility). Lately, I may get a few hours in the HT a week, so films get chosen carefully. Can Fatshaft measure the 5.1 track (if available) on the BD and see what he gets? JSS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Electrodynamic Posted February 2, 2016 Report Share Posted February 2, 2016 I thought the movie was pretty cool. Definitely a lot of headroom which I really enjoy. The scene where the helicopter comes into frame from overhead had me furiously grabbing for the remote to turn it down because my 3 year old son was alseep in the next room, haha. I really want to watch this during the day with no one else in the house so I can really crank it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infrasonic Posted February 16, 2016 Report Share Posted February 16, 2016 You gotta stop watching movies when the lil guy is asleep. Have him join ya! And Sicario is a totally reasonable fun-filled romp for a 3-year old to enjoy. Totally. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.