I went in to a local theatre the other day to check playback for a preview screening for a feature film I have worked on, and unfortunately it didn’t quite sound right. The Director had sent the facility an MP4 for playback (this particular theatrette can’t handle DCPs), which supposedly had a 5.1 surround sound audio track embedded. I suspected there was some upmixing going on, but the venue didn’t think there should be any. In the end I grabbed a copy of the MP4 to check, and it turns out it was only a 2.0 stereo file, so there was definitely some sort of processing going on through playback as we had sound coming from the surround speakers. We’ve got a new MP4 from the Director, and it has 5.1 sound embedded which I have checked in my studio space so it should be all good, but because there are some possible variables there, I have made a QuickTime movie speaker calibration video, which I plan on taking in to the theatre so that I can check speaker calibrations directly from a Quicktime movie playback.
The calibration process is roughly based on the process spelt out by Blue Sky in this post:
http://abluesky.com/support/blue-sky-calibration-test-files/
The Speaker Calibration Video I made might be useful to other people who want to check their calibration, so I have made the video available for people to download and use from:
http://versedweb.com.au/resources/Speaker_Calibration_Video.zip