Installation and demonstration: November 1, 2014
The Department of Sound Recording and Design at Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute is proud to announce that SRFTI is the first national film school in India to install a 3D surround sound system. This is one of the greatest new developments in audio technology after the advent of basic surround sound.
The system that has been installed, AURO 3D, is revolutionary because it is one of the first systems to give a sense of the height of the sound source to the film viewer. In traditional monophonic and, later, stereophonic sound, the viewer perceives the sound to originate from various sources in front of the viewer behind the cinema hall screen. Afterwards, surround sound was developed whereby sounds seem to come from behind the viewer.
However, these technologies fail to convey a sense of height to the viewer. For example, if the film shows that an airplane is flying over the viewer from back to front, 5.1 and even 7.1 surround can merely convey the impression that the sound is moving from the rear to the front of the cinema hall. It is up to the viewer to imagine that the sound source is overhead. However, in 3D sound we have, for the first time, individual speakers placed at 2 different height levels throughout the cinema hall and individual channels assigned to each of the speakers. There is even a speaker placed at the ceiling of the cinema hall. The result for the viewer is an amazing acoustic sense of actually being present at the location of the film like never before.
Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute is planning a domain shift from analog celluloid to digital cinema. With this new development, the Department of Sound Recording and Design is now fully equipped and prepared to work in the digital cinema domain as it is introduced to the other departments of SRFTI.
