Last year, the venerable CBS TV news magazine 60 Minutes undertook its biggest procedural overhaul in the program's 40 years of existence. The show went to high-definition broadcasting with accompanying 5.1 audio.

Roy Halee, Jr., Rerecording Mixer for the show, is excited by the surround work he's done so far, as well as by the prospects that await future segments. "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 says. "I'm having a blast."

System designers and equipment manufacturers may have questions on how to eliminate the ambiguity of Dolby® E alignment measurements with reference to various video formats. To ensure error-free editing and switching of Dolby E signals, we have developed a recommended approach to alignment issues.

With the successful achievement of broadcasting this past summer’s Olympic Games, China Central Television (CCTV) is working to rebroadcast all of the programming in HD with Dolby® Digital 5.1 audio. To improve the efficiency of this process, CCTV has tested the Dolby DP600 Program Optimizer’s ability to provide an automated work flow for transcoding multichannel audio programming into the Dolby E format.

CCTV will remix all audio programming and format it into multichannel WAV files with Dolby audio metadata. (Neyrinck SoundCode for Broadcast software will be used to create these files.) For its test, CCTV used the DP600 to automatically ingest the files and execute Dolby E transcoding in faster than real time. The completed Dolby E files are then joined with the video files and carried in the MXF format for broadcast.