CBS Brings Surround to 60 Minutes

Last year, the venerable CBS TV news magazine 60 Minutes undertook its biggest procedural overhaul in the program’s 40 years of existence. According to Roy Halee, Jr., Rerecording Mixer for the show, “The announcement came at the end of our 40th season last spring. Our executive management and executive producer wanted to go high definition. Our directors, Robert Klug and Alicia Tanz Flaum, wanted 5.1 audio to accompany it.

“As soon as I heard that,” he says, “we revamped our room. CBS updated to the current Pro Tools^® and upgraded the console to the Icon D-Command^® with a Genelec® 5.1 speaker system.”

Audio Capture and Surround Preparation

While recording segments in the field, crews follow specific guidelines for capturing audio. The interviewee and the correspondent each wear a lavalier mic. A stereo microphone signal is also used, either from the camera or from a boom mic. Halee will later draw from these four channels to build a 5.1-channel soundstage appropriate to the picture.

Back at CBS, an Avid® editor places additional voiceovers on track 1, and all mono nat sounds on 2. (The term “nat sound” is used by CBS to describe natural, or ambient, sound recordings at a medium distance from the correspondent and interviewee.) The guest mic is placed on track 3, correspondent mic on 4, and stereo information from the cameras or boom mic on 5 and 6. If additional stereo material (such as music) is used, it is placed on tracks 7 and 8.

Halee imports these tracks into a Pro Tools session. “I made a template, with the help of Robert Miller from Digidesign and Zach Winn, Sound Effects Mixer here at CBS. It gets me off and running. Each track in the session has what I call a ‘soundstage box’ dedicated to the particular track. For instance, the narration track has a soundstage box going primarily to the Center channel, with some divergence to the Left and Right front channels.” This creates a slight wash of dialogue at the front channels, a deviation from movie-style dialogue, which is placed almost exclusively in the Center channel.

The mono nat track is panned left to right and front to back in the soundstage (that is, the signal is located in the Left, Right, Left Surround, and Right Surround channels). “This might be from a mono boom mic, say, walking and talking with the subject,” remarks Halee. “Then we have the stereo mics coming off the camera, placed hard left and right, leaning a little toward the front, but with some signal going to the rear channels. If the direction of the action calls for me to move the soundstage, I'll pan it to make the soundstage match the picture—for instance, if it's a nature piece with a moving animal, or traffic crossing left to right.” 60 Minutes also features regular coverage of war and conflict across the world; battle sequences depicted in these stories often employ bass information in the LFE channel in addition to directional movement for heightened realism.

Halee mixes the components in 5.1 and sends the stream, as an AAF file, to CBS’s Avid Unity™ ISIS® server. Both Andy Rooney’s segments and the general story intros are mixed (also in 5.1) at a separate studio by Mike Ruschak and published to the same server. Final assembly of these files is performed in the CBS mastering room. The mastering room is equipped with a Dolby® DP570 Multichannel Audio Tool, which is used to monitor the original 5.1 as well as the emulated stereo downmix.

The mastering room itself is aligned to a reference sound pressure level (SPL) of 80 dB. This was assessed by the operators to be a comfortable listening level, and complies with common practice for TV mixing. Both Halee's mixing room and the mix room used to develop story introductions, teases, and other elements are balanced at this same SPL, so mixes from these rooms play well against each other.

The program is released (or played out) as a 5.1-channel program with a mono secondary audio program (SAP). (The SAP is a mono version of the program in English, rather than an alternative language version.) The stereo version of the program is created in CBS’s broadcast center using a DP563 Dolby Surround and Pro Logic® II Encoder.

News Segments Gain New Dimension

Having prepared seven episodes at the time of this writing, Halee is excited by the surround work he’s done so far, as well as by the prospects that await future segments. “Each piece so far has been different,” he says. “The election piece we ran in November, for instance, included a lot of ambient sound from the convention hall. I had my main narration spread in the Center, Left, and Right channels. But then when the camera cut to Barack Obama speaking, I took his voice out of the Center channel, and kept it both Left/Right and front to back to give it a true convention hall sound. That included both Obama on mic, plus the ambience from the camera mic.

“I'm always playing with the divergence between the front and the rear soundstage. But at the same time, the picture is always dictating what's going on.” Halee continues, “It's been very creative; each of the seven shows we've done are audibly rich in natural sounds and it's been fun to play with the soundstage.” He concludes by saying, “I'm having a blast. This program really made a big step. It went from mono sound straight to the 21st century. The audio is now not just a secondary thought in television terms. It's half of the broadcast now.”