Peak Film · Surround sound

Surround sound and Dolby Atmos

Stereo, 5.1, 7.1 and Dolby Atmos, mixed and mastered in our own suite by the same people who were standing in the room when the sound was recorded.

Atmos treats sound as objects placed in a space rather than as channels fed to fixed speakers. The practical consequence is that one mix translates properly from a cinema to a living room to a pair of headphones, instead of being remade from scratch for each of them. For documentary work, where a film may find its audience anywhere between a festival screening and a phone, that is not a luxury.

Why doing it here matters

A film handed to a facility at the final stage is mixed by people meeting it for the first time. They are usually very good, and they are working blind: they were not on the hillside when the wind got up, and they did not sit through the interview that the whole sequence turns on. Ours is finished by the same team who were on location and know what a scene was meant to feel like.

It removes a scheduling dependency as well. A mix that needs another two days gets another two days, rather than another slot in somebody else's diary at somebody else's day rate.

The room

Conversion and interfacing: An RME Fireface UFX+ as the main interface, with an earlier RME unit kept alongside it purely for redundancy. Unglamorous, but it is the difference between a failed box costing an hour and a failed box costing a session a contributor has travelled to attend.
Control surface: A customised Mackie control surface carrying twenty-four physical channel strips — real faders under both hands rather than one mouse pointer moving one thing at a time. On a documentary mix, where dialogue, atmosphere and music are constantly being weighed against each other, that is the difference between shaping a scene and editing a list of numbers.
Monitoring: THX-certified Mackie monitors alongside Tannoy Dialogue monitors, which run twin bass drivers to a separate high-frequency unit and carry custom-built amplifiers.
Microphones: Led by a Neumann U 87 Ai, the large-diaphragm condenser that has been the industry standard for recorded voice since the 1960s. Around it, a collection of more than fifty covering effectively any source a documentary produces — interviews in rooms never intended for recording, location atmospheres, and the close, deliberate work that Foley and ADR demand. On location the camera rigs themselves carry Sennheiser MKH 416 P48 shotguns — the short shotgun that has been standard on film and television booms for decades, chosen because it rejects what is beside it and keeps what is in front of it. At the other extreme, DPA 4061 and 4062 miniatures cover sources at pressures that would defeat a studio condenser — a Formula One engine at full revs among them. They run on phantom power circuitry built in house rather than bought.

Working across two dissimilar sets of monitors rather than one is deliberate. The Mackies and the Tannoys load a room differently and fail differently; a mix that holds up on both is a mix that will hold up in a cinema and on a television. That cross-check is much of the point of working in object-based audio to begin with.

The microphone collection matters for the same reason at the other end of the chain. Choosing the right microphone at the point of capture removes problems that no amount of mixing afterwards genuinely fixes, and a documentary rarely gets a second take.

Delivery

We deliver the stems and masters a distributor asks for, in the formats they ask for. Where a platform or a festival has specified something unusual, it is far better raised before the mix than after it — the same principle that governs how we shoot.

Enquiries

If you have a documentary that needs mixing or mastering, or simply a second opinion on audio that is not sitting right, get in touch through Peak Film.

Related: in-house engineering — the workshop that builds our production equipment also builds and maintains equipment in this room.

← Back to Peak Film