Eng. Raul Oropeza
One of the conferences organized by our student section last week was about a rather unusual subject- surround sound in Mexican television (TV). Eng. Raul Oropeza, Technical Director of Professional Audio of Televisa, was the invited speaker. He has worked in many important projects around professional Surround Sound.
An unusual subject because, traditionally, Mexican TV broadcasting companies haven't been interested in investing to get better quality audio in their transmissions. This is mainly due to the fact that that sort of work would be very underappreciated in a country where the majority of people don't have good sound systems with which to watch TV. Even so, some people in the industry are working on giving TV audio a more professional look and using new technologies to achieve a better sound quality in TV broadcasting.
Surround sound has changed the way we watch movies and how we listen to music. To put it bluntly, once you've experienced a 5.1 system you don't ever want to go back.
Dolby Surround 5.1 Sound uses 6 independent channels carefully positioned to create a three- dimensional listening experience. Three channels go in front (left, centre and right), two in the back (left surround and right surround) and one more channel is used only for low frequencies (hence the 5.1).
Raul Oropeza named the basic steps followed to develop an audio post-production project. You need:
• an idea
• pre-production
• production
• post-production
• presentation
Post-production is:
• incidental sounds
• special effects (sound design)
• score
• mix (mastering)
For this job you need creativity, organization, a good reference team, a room with special acoustics and the 5.1 Dolby coders and decoders.
