Will alternative immersive channels create an imperative for broadcasters? Veronique Larcher, Director of AMBEO Immersive Audio, Sennheiser, explores immersive content outside of the commercial broadcast space, including virtual, augmented, and mixed realities.
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Director of photography John Christian Rosenlund has at least a three-decade history with director Bent Hamer. Their most recent collaboration, The Middle Man, depicts a town in the northern United States during a post-industrial depression. It’s perhaps not a subject instinctively associated with Rosenlund and Hamer’s Norwegian roots, though when we learn that the production is based on a book by Norwegian author Lars Saabye Christensen, the link becomes clear.
HRTF stands for Head Related Transfer Function and, simply put, is a catch-all term for the characteristics a human head imparts on sound before it enters the ear canal. Everything from level tonal changes caused by our head, shoulders, and pinna (external ear parts), to arrival-time differences (Interaural Time Difference, or ITD) between the two ears have an effect on our perception of the direction and distance of sources.
Before pandemics and the downsizing at traditional, broadcast news operations, many news and non-fiction DOPs were already assuming a significant role in post-production. Whereas frame rates, f-stops, and the character of our lenses, once formed the backbone of our expertise and practice, DOPs in the non-theatrical realm increasingly find ourselves in a different kind of ditty bag, as correspondent, writer, director, and ersatz editor – all rolled into a one-person-can-do-anything-and-everything mode.
The familiar “Faster, Higher, Stronger” motto is not just for Olympic athletes but also applies to the common man (and woman): The first black-and-white television sets were considered a sensation until color TV came along, opening a whole new dimension to the viewing audience. In parallel, cinema screens grew ever taller and wider. This went hand in hand with the switch from mono to stereo and a stunning series of dramatic boosts regarding picture quality. While 4K is still in the process of being implemented, more daring early adopters are already grooming their 8K offering.
For a long time, selecting camera gear has been fairly easy. For twenty years, digital cinema cameras have never quite had everything we wanted, and the choice often boiled down to comparing the compromises. That’ll always be true to a degree, but for the last year or two it’s felt like we’re arriving somewhere. We can’t have anything, but we can have more than enough, and those compromises are boiling down to a zero-sum game.
It’s perhaps a little unfair to blame modern visual effects people for the fact that audiences are becoming a little jaded about green screen. If we’re to conclude that there’s some sort of quality problem with VFX, we’d need to be sure that we were noticing each and every use, so we know how big the sample is. Many of the applications of VFX, in modern movies, are actually comparatively simple fixes or paint-outs of inappropriate details that nobody ever notices – the boom reflected in a window, the anachronistic sign in a period piece. If we’re not aware of these VFX, they can’t really be objectionable, and we have no idea what proportion of VFX are actually a problem.
Sennheiser examines the theory, implementation, and uses of the Ambisonic soundfield, and its important role in the immersive audio world.
