Following our article Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment - Everything You Need To Know we were asked about the business model behind upgrading to Dolby Atmos. In this article we outline the business case for Dolby Atmos by asking industry experts, mixing in Dolby Atmos to share their business reasoning for investing in Dolby Atmos.

In commenting to our article Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment - Everything You Need To Know, community member Sam Fishkin asked…

“This is all fantastic guidance but will you also discuss the pros/cons of making the conversion to Atmos from a business standpoint? What companies are asking for Atmos in their deliverables, what’s the potential upcharge for doing the work, and how much new business is out there to divide up?”

To help answer this question we turned to a number of people at the top of their games who have recently chosen to upgrade their own facilities to enable them to mix and deliver content in Dolby Atmos. We put Sam’s question to them and here are their responses.

Alan Sallabank

We start with Alan Sallabank who not only has chosen to invest in Dolby Atmos, he has also produced an excellent tutorial series to help people starting in Dolby Atmos.

To me, this question is the wrong way around. For most people I know, including my own facility, the decision to push up to Atmos was not about what business we could gain, but about what business we would lose, by not being able to deliver Atmos or the expense of having to dry hire a facility with it. 

I bit the bullet to be able to accommodate Atmos because of demand. My peers were doing it, and the content we were pitching to mix required it. Distributors like Atmos as it is a single file delivery, that adapts according to the playback device. 

In terms of the upcharge, that is also a grey area. On the whole, productions seem to recognise that a lot more equipment, software and most importantly, expertise, is involved, but, most productions don't have the budget headroom to completely cover the sheer amount of investment required if you go for an incredibly expensive setup. Where you can "upcharge' though, is for the time it takes - the mastering and deliverables process is all real-time - there is no "offline export" process. 

Equipping your studio with Atmos doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive either. If you are realistic about what you are delivering to, you can specify an Atmos capable rig for four figures, rather than five. Shop around. Take advice from other people and case studies such as the ones here on Production Expert. Read between the lines. If you simply go to your favourite reseller and ask them to specify your system, you will end up with an incredible system, but it'll take thousands of studio hours to pay off. 

I recently got an inquiry about setting up for Atmos from a radio studio. At first glance, you'd think, "this is a visual format sound delivery", but when you delve further, the sound makes up 100% of the experience in radio. 

What I've taken to doing is suggesting Atmos to clients who haven't even asked for it. I've sent them demos and demonstrated what Atmos can bring to their productions. This has gained feedback like this - "The sense of space and clarity that the mix has is a credit to your work. I noticed it as soon as I put my headphones on and started listening. The results are speaking for themselves!"

Jamey Scott

Jamey is an LA studio owner and post mixer at Dramatic Post as well as a key player in the Dolby Atmos For Professional Facebook page and you may also remember his Mac mini Meltdown.

“With the purchase of my Mac Pro, 8-card MTRX system and all of the speaker installations, I probably spent upwards of $50k on my Atmos upgrade. It all works great and I can, and have been, getting Atmos work done from start to finish with this system set up in my home studio.

I pre-dubbed a couple of movies in Atmos that were mixed on an Atmos stage but was not able to charge more than my daily pre-dubbing rate for those as it was my choice; the client didn't request it and would have been just as fine fulfilling the requirement with a post-mix upmix.

I've been mixing a Netflix show, which although can handle Atmos deliverables, this particular show did not want to spend any more for Atmos so I'm just doing 5.1 mixes for it.

I've had a couple of small jobs come in for Atmos specific mixes but have not been charging more than my daily mix rate for it.

So my realistic tally after 1 year of full Atmos capability is that I have not earned even remotely enough to justify the expense; probably not even a single dollar above my normal rates. Maybe that will change and if it does, I'll certainly be ready for it but I just haven't seen the demand from my existing clients at this point.

That said, from an artistic standpoint, nothing beats mixing in Atmos. It's such a thrill to make stuff so big and immersive so if you have the money to spend, upgrading your studio to handle Atmos is a great way to spend it.”

Graham Kirkman

You may remember Graham shared the story of Building A Dolby Atmos Equipped Garden Studio - A Complete Guide recently, which he now uses as his base as a freelance dubbing mixer.

“In my audio field, the only client I know of who is currently asking for .atmos mixes is Netflix, and to be honest, they seem to be still accepting 5.1 instead, but I do believe this will change to them asking for the vast majority of their files as .atmos sooner rather than later.

At that point, I predict that companies like Sky will also change to this delivery format as well. Because of this, as a freelancer, without Atmos capabilities, it wouldn't be too long before I'd be turning jobs down because I wouldn't be able to do them.

Technically I didn't upgrade to Atmos. As I was building a room from scratch I chose to include Atmos as the format for my studio. This means that the question of 'from a business standpoint' doesn't really apply to me as I was not upgrading an existing one. This meant that I didn't have to worry about...

1. Installing additional ceiling speakers in an already working room.

2. Extra unforeseen cost, as I'd already got most of the gear and had budgeted months in advance already for what I didn't have.

3. Closing down an already operational room, losing client money as it was upgraded.

Because of this, my reasons for including Atmos may be different than those genuinely upgrading an existing room.

1. I was building a studio from scratch, so had a 'blank slate' to do what I wanted. This made installing Atmos simpler as I didn't actually have to 'upgrade' as such - just design from scratch

2. Building a new studio these days and NOT including Atmos is the stranger choice rather than including it!

3. I already had most of the gear so money was less of an option that 'bolting it on' to an already finished 5.1 or 2.0 room.

4. The vast majority of my London based clients either have already or are planning to upgrade a suite to Atmos so I predict more Atmos job requests in the future and don't want to have to turn them down.

Nathaniel Reichman

Nathaniel shared his experiences of building a Dolby Atmos monitor controller using the DSP modules in Metric Halo interfaces.

There were a few factors, working together, that convinced me to upgrade to Atmos:

Before COVID-19, only about 20% of the spec sheets coming in required Dolby Atmos. I would take these projects to another studio to complete because I didn’t have enough total Atmos projects to justify the upgrade cost. But in a COVID-19 world, I didn’t want to be dependent on another studio being open to satisfy a client’s needs. I needed to confidently say “yes” over the phone. And we’re gradually seeing more interest in Atmos either as an option or a requirement.

Then there is prestige. The industry is very competitive. Clients like it when they see that you are capable of more than what they’re asking for on their project. It reassures them that you are staying current and that when it comes to more mundane technical specs, you know what you’re doing.

Finally, there is a legacy issue. A couple of projects in 2019 and 2020 were high-profile, and ten or twenty years from now I want to look back and be confident that I brought all the resources and all the tools that were available at the time to make the project as great as possible. Even if Atmos fails to take hold in the consumer market, it will stay with us as the best way to really hear a mix in high-end venues and studios.

Korey Pereira

A while back Korey shared his home studio Dolby Atmos upgrade in our article Building A DIY Home Studio For Dolby Atmos Mixing.

While I didn’t have a pressing demand from my schedule at the time to mix in Atmos, with studios like Netflix increasingly requiring Atmos deliverables on their spec sheets for projects, I wanted to be ahead of the curve.

Making the jump to Atmos is more than just ordering some gear and running a few cables. I wanted to really understand the process and have my workflow down now so that I wasn’t “figuring it out” in the midst of a major project. So what did I do? I ordered some gear, ran a few cables, and dug in. If you want to read about this process, check out my article.

You won’t necessarily be able to charge more for mixing in Atmos, but it will make you available to say yes to the job that (for creative reasons or studio spec sheets) requires it. Once you are set up to mix in Atmos, even if the spec sheet doesn’t require it, you can add an extra level of future-proofing to your work by mixing them natively in Atmos. I have personally mixed an ad campaign and currently mixing a feature in Atmos. The ad campaign delivered in stereo and the feature will most likely only be displayed in 5.1, but gave me a great chance to get comfortable with the format.

Later this year, one of the studios I freelance for will be posting a feature for Netflix that will be delivered in Atmos. Especially with the current world situation, I am very glad to have my own Atmos setup at home, from which, I can do my work for this project.

Atmos is here to stay and we as an industry will only continue to see more companies, like Netflix, require we deliver in the format. I might have been on the early side of upgrading as a smaller studio, but for anyone that is looking to make the jump now, it is easier than ever.

While a dedicated RMU is great if you have the budget, the recent improvements to the local renderer workflow have made it possible to mix and printmaster on the same system. Interfaces like the Avid MTRX Studio acts as your Digilink interface, monitor controller and built-in speaker tuning provide a compact 1U box for working in Atmos.

Sreejesh Nair

Sreejesh has written a lot of blog posts on film sound as well as other topics like loudness and working in Dolby Atmos long before it was the cool thing to do. Check out his articles here on Production Expert.

One of the key points I have felt over the past few months when it came to Dolby Atmos is to also look at it from the point of Atmos for music and not just OTT. This is an upcoming key area that is very interesting to pursue. While OTT has asked for Dolby Atmos, in India, it still isn't mandatory as a deliverable. But that doesn't mean it won't be in the coming months. Until then, it is a tough decision to make. But, looking at it from Atmos for music, this is a huge opportunity. Bear in mind, that although the platforms are limited, for now, that still leaves a lot of opportunities for content creation. 

There is a higher rate for Atmos, but it is not way higher than the conventional rate. What happens is the time required increases anywhere from 20 to 50% compared to a conventional mix. Again this is completely dependent on the content that is being mixed.

Here are my Pros and Cons for putting up an Atmos facility for OTT / Music.

Pros:

1. Ability to deliver mixes that are possible for future expansion. There could be shows that are a hit and require to be remixed for Atmos.

2. The ability to have deliverables that are futureproofed while archiving. 

3. Having music for a much wider platform if its phones or for soundbars. (I personally haven't seen a lot of people with Dolby atmos soundbars though)

4. Work for version mixes for larger companies. 

5. The room is still backwards compatible with conventional surround.

6. Ability to do sound design for theatrical mixes (if and when it happens though. Many rooms are backwards compatible with an RMU so the routing doesn't change)

Cons:

1. ROI may still take some time given the current situation, but I personally think Dolby Atmos for music has the potential to improve that.

2. Transitioning to this from a conventional mix (for music) requires some time to get used to it.

3. There is still a lack of confirmation on using the RMU vs Production Suite for deliverables and that can change the investment amount.

4. There still is no mandatory requirement on Dolby Atmos as a deliverable.

Reid Caulfield

Reid is Re-Recording Mixer & VP of Operations at Central Post in L.A. He has merged decades of creative sound and video work with highly technical ability and infrastructure build-out experience for large & small facilities.

We began planning for my Los Angeles sound facility, Central Post L.A., almost four years ago, at the end of 2017. By Autumn 2017, we had a ‘soft open’. Three of our four rooms were ready to run by October. The fourth room was delayed because we had, many months before, decided to make it a certified Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment mix & QC room. Dolby actually designed the bulk of the room for us, given that the space was relatively small and, especially in a smaller Atmos room, speaker geometry gets very complicated very fast. This was also in the days when Netflix required any & all Atmos work to be done in Dolby Certified room, which is no longer the case, enabling many more home studios coming online with Atmos-capable rooms.

If one were building a facility or a single room from scratch any time over the last four years, up until right now, it would be silly to not at least plan for Atmos. However, if I were tacking Atmos on to an existing 5.1 or 7.1 facility, I would wait. In two of our other non-Atmos rooms 3-4 years ago, we ran the wiring for the ceiling speakers, since we were in the ceilings already anyway. All that needs to be done is to hang the additional ceiling speakers (all rooms are at least 7.1 capable) and change out the interface to a DAD or an Avid MTRX. We have the DAD, since the MTRX was not yet available 4 years ago. We also have a hardware Dolby RMU ( a Dell server).

We have not yet converted any of our other rooms to Atmos, simply because the anticipated work did not follow through. So again, if I owned a 5.1 room or facility, would I convert to Atmos without having a solid book of business to back it up? No, I would not. Tacking Atmos on top of existing infrastructure is a pain & it’s more expensive than building that way from the outset.

In Hollywood, most ‘A’- level scripted drama is mixed at union facilities. But that’s not the majority of the business in town. We are a non-union house, simply because that’s where the vast bulk of business is, but we compete with more facilities, including “kitchen table” and “garden shed” rooms & facilities than anywhere else in the world. And that was before COVID. It’s even worse now.

So we do a lot of reality work, documentaries, some scripted, etc. We’re a “wide” facility, so we also do digital dailies at the front end of production and IMF packaging & delivery at the back end of the post-production process, and a lot in-between. We have picture edit suites, rooms alone or equipment packages or rooms plus equipment for hire, HD/4k & DolbyVision color rooms - actually, the only thing we have not done up to now is VFX, and that has just changed. Now we do it, albeit at a different geographical location to our two sound houses.

Years ago, Atmos for Home Entertainment was being touted as a savior for facilities that had been struggling for a decade. Atmos, along with newly instituted industrial-strength security considerations have actually forced a good number of facilities and owners out of the business, but triple the number came right up behind them, including ours. Here’s how the Atmos for Home Entertainment pitch went four years ago:

“Netflix, Apple, Amazon, then finally all the networks, are going to standardize on three things: Atmos HE for sound, 4k/HDR/DolbyVision for color and IMF for delivery. Every show will need to deliver these three things. So, even if you have a legacy 5.1 mixed show, it will need to be packaged up as an IMF file, and while you’re at it, try to convince your clients to update to an Atmos mix, or at the very least, package up the 5.1 into an Atmos delivery file, and charge for it. Oh and also, all of this - every stem, every flattened 5.1, 7.1 and 2.0 down mix, - it all needs to be QC’d. And even at $400 an hour, there still won’t be enough hours in the day to get it done. Oh, and one more thing: start selling full remixes for existing 5.1 & 7.1 content up to Atmos! Just get the original Pro Tools sessions form the original sound houses and remix the whole thing!”

LOL to that last one. Just TRY extracting an original PT session from a facility in Hollywood. Go ahead. Try. See what happens. The stories I could tell. Perhaps that’s a different article, but  I promise it won’t be pretty (PT session sabotage, etc).

So that was the pitch 3-4 years ago. Here’s why it never materialized: no one wanted to pay for it. Netflix et al did not, in fact, mandate Atmos packages (I think Apple may have, but I’m not sure). Then Netflix saw the client backlash and dialled back the Atmos talk, and then they made it easier - along with Avid and Steinberg to make it - so that sound editors & mixers need not work in a Dolby-certified room for the creative edit & mix. The final product still needs to be authored in a certified facility and room, but not the creative. OK, so we still have QC and authoring.

I love Dolby. And Avid. Mostly Dolby. Lovely people, great products. Netflix too, and Amazon & Apple. I love ‘em all. I have nothing bad to say about any of them. The problem was the actual producers. Here are a couple of examples of what we’ve seen.

Atmos QC

A year ago, we were contracted to do the Atmos HE QC on a huge Apple show. Looking at this show, it’s clear the budget was 5-7 million dollars per episode. The producers were actually working with a smaller creative facility that had never done an Atmos mix before. With respect, all of their deliverables were a mess. Empty M&E stems, PFX only, distortion all over the ceiling channels. The producers came through at our place for me to describe what we’d be doing post-creative, the elements we’d need to prosecute a full QC set etc. That QC mostly fell through because they ran out of time and Apple panicked and decided to do the QC themselves because the shows were late for delivery/air dates because of all the original delivery issues. We still got paid for the QC of the entire 10 episodes or whatever it was, so that was nice.

Producers would come through and we would go through the “Dolby-preferred” QC practice and, bluntly, they would tell us to f*ck off. “Nope. Absolutely not. We’ll QC the Domestic version and leave it at that. If they need a QC of the M&E Atmos files or the folddowns, then can pay for it Germany or wherever. Take it out of someone else’s budget."

On the creative side:

A year before that - so, early Summer of 2018 - the broadcast network for one of the biggest American shows on television - a Sci-Fi series - came to us, but very quietly. The first season of this flagship show had not been mixed in Atmos HE because it was "too expensive" (remember, it’s a union show, and at the time, big mix stages were charging way more for Atmos mixes than they were for 5.1), so the producers - some of the biggest and richest companies in Hollywood - passed on Atmos and they mixed it in 5.1.

Now, I can honestly say that, if ever there was an argument for an Atmos HE mix, this show was it. So they came to us and to me for an “Upmix.” They got us some 5.1 stems but not all, some 2.0 stems, but not all. That’s okay. I’ve been upmixing for decades, so once we had received all of the elements - well, all that we were ever going to get, anyway - I ran through the 45 minute show in real-time, taking notes. I guessed at the amount of creative work & number of hours that would be required to do a full episode up mix to Atmos and I set about to tinker. Basically, it took me 12 hours over two days but my estimate was 8-9 hours of purely creative editorial and mix work for the Domestic version, more for a full M&E set, but they weren’t asking for that anyway.

So, 8-9 hours of creative, then a four-hour client rundown, then printmaster and Dolby ADM files. Two full days. So, for 14 episodes, say a total of about $90k USD  to account for contingencies for a fully Dolby-compliant set of deliverables. 80-85k if we were to do a package deal. Great.

A couple of weeks later, the client came in to review. We had arranged for a simple A/B comparison: Original 5.1, rewind, same section in 7.1.4. It would be honest to say that their jaws hit the floor. This presented a political problem. I suppose they had thought that the difference wouldn’t be that startling, and so there’d be nothing to present at their next creative meeting, but that was not the case. Immediately, their problem became very clear:

"How are we going to tell two of the biggest, most storied sound houses on planet earth - as well as the original ‘A’ union mixers - that we had converted their 5.1 mixes to Atmos and were planning to release it on the network?”

• The producers are going to complain that an original Atmos mix was going to cost at least double that of a 5.1 and that’s why they decided on 5.1

• Yes, but doing it this way - without the need for original Pro Tools sessions,  just using 5.1 & 2.0 stems - is way less expensive. How much? $6,000-$8000 USD, all in, for the domestic (English) version. Creative, deliverables, everything. Way less than remixing natively or mixing natively in the first place.

• OK. Well, we’ll have to get the producers and original mixers and sound supervisors involved and they’re going to want to go back and redo it all natively. They’re not going to want a small facility doing this in the space of a month and a half. There’s going to be a lot of yelling & screaming and egos bruised.

They paid us for our work, which was nice of them.

In Conclusion

Look. Dolby Atmos for Home Entertainment is a wonderful promise. But the cost to equip for the studio and the inability or unwillingness for clients to pay extra for the format - not to mention the politics and egos - make it a promise yet-unfulfilled, at least for anything other than ‘AAA’ television product.

Conclusion

There you have it, a range of views, but there are some common threads. There is clearly a growing call for Dolby Atmos, and it makes sense to upgrade your studio now, whether you are working in music or broadcast, get familiar with the workflows and future-proof the work you are doing for your clients even if they don’t need Dolby Atmos mixes right now.