SurroundByUs.com

It's clear most of the project activity here is centered around music only sources..... Has anyone done a stereo to surround conversion for a movie or music videos?

In ancient days the only way to enjoy a music video was with the nasty quality VHS offered. If you wanted good sound you had to listen to a LP or CD. Laserdisc pretty much changed that with a top quality spam video picture & CD quality digital stereo. Of course LD also had surround sound but in that case, you would have no need to upconvert. As time went on I now feel I am pretty much missing something if I don't have video to go with the music.

From LD I have converted most all of Chisato Moritaka's video clip collections. These are ultimately put on DVD using DTS at the 1.5 MB/s rate. For her live performances I tend to be happy with PL II but I tweak the EQ & enhance separation using using Adobe Audition. This gives me a good balance between front direct sound & hall size. I have also had very good results with Ayumi Hamasaki's SECRET video collection, Basia's London Warsaw New York, & Prince's Greatest Hits. These last titles were all done in high separation wrap around sound, again using the DTS format.

I wouldn't expect anyone here to know about a wonderful gem of a film called The Wizard of Speed & Time but it is one of my all time favorites, never failing to lift my spirits & entertain:



Released on video in 1989 after a micro run in the theaters it was available in only VHS & LD. Of course I have the LD but the audio was only DD 2.0, & not a bit more. Not even the happy accident random phase stuff to liven up the back channels. This was a visually stunning & insanely creative film (for the time period & budget) & the audio begged to be redone. It was very time consuming working on a 90 minute feature in pieces at a time but worth every bit of it. The sound was leveled, normalized, foley effects added, panned to follow action, swirling gun shot sound fields, denoised & coaxed into a lively vibrant 5.1 sound field.

Has anyone else been nutty enough beside me to launch into a combined audio / video upconvert project? I would really like hear what other's have done.

On the old dtsac3 forum, I helped a few people with their video project to convert a stereo soundtrack to surround and remux it with the video stream. But I've never done it for myself.

There's also a few folks out there who are pretty well-versed in this area. If they haven't joined us yet here, I'm sure they will in the near future.

Thanks for the reply!
Looks like this topic might pick up some activity as time goes on.