Dolby E: who gets to buy it?

So, those of you doing 5.1 mixes for our network friends, have you bought or are you going to buy the Dolby E encoders and decoders required to make the 5.1 deliverables? Does the Dolby E encode look like it will become part of the sound work for a show or part of the layback/video mastering? Philip Perkins

Funny thing about Dolby E... Last season we did a lot of Dolby E laybacks. This season we're doing more discreet tracks to HD-SR (which has 16 track audio capability), with the discreet 6 track Printmaster, Pro Logic II limited 2 track, and mono dialog, FX, and stereo music stems. Dolby E is definitely a layback process, so unless you are doing laybacks for air masters I wouldn't consider it part of the normal audio work flow. I have never seen a request for Dolby E to be delivered to anything but video tape. Bob

Yeah...just started doing Dolby E. We output 6 mono tracks labeled. L,R,C,LS,RS,LF. I also encode a matrix encoded LT/RT mix using Surround Circle that does an excellent job. I find putting the files to DVD easiest...DA-88 are real-time and annoying. Send the DVD with the 6 discreet channels plus the LT RT over to a dubbing house to marry it to the HD-Tape. Problem is Dolby E hardware is very expensive so unless you're doing a lot of shows it's more cost effective sending it to a dubbing house instead of making a large investment. They need to make a plugin for Final Cut Pro that encodes Dolby E directly to HD tape. Nate

Virtually none of the post houses around here (SF) have Dolby E stuff, so to make the deliverables it may be up to me, the sound guy, to rent the boxes and provide the post houses w/ Dolby E encoded pairs that they can line up in the Avid and dub to HD along w/ picture. I had been thinking that Dolby E was a post facility kind of thing--part of mastering really, but maybe I'm wrong. Philip Perkins

Hi Phil, I'm in SF as well and haven't found anyone to rent the boxes from. I haven't had to provide Dolby E yet but I was doing some What if research. The best I could come up with was renting from LA. I had heard that Dolby Labs would encode for you but not the SF one. The said no. They also told me that the format is losing ground and that I should hold out from buying one because everything is moving to discreeet file based delivery. They guy probably shouldn't have told me that but he did.

We do a lot of work for local PBS and some for national PBS. Their requirements use Dolby E and Pro Logic 1 or 2. We have both encoders and decoders. It is part of what we do on a regular basis. With SR it does have 12 tracks and we have been using it for a while now. But nothing we have done for Broadcast has required discrete outputs they all want Dolby E or Pro Logic. Mike