Imagine a train speeding toward you, its whistle screaming; a bullet grazes your head-Zing!; a herd of buffalo stampedes across the prairie and shakes the ground. What these scenarios have in common is the element of sound that becomes louder as objects whiz onto the screen and fades away as visuals disappear.
Presenter Professional’s ability to place 3D microphones and sound effects precisely within its Digital SoundStage environment produces lifelike sound effects that add depth, feel and richness to multimedia, game, film and video production. The result is a three-dimensional surround sound that envelopes the viewer, adding an extraordinary sense of realism to the visual presentation. Just as surround sound enhances the motion picture visual experience, 3D sound enhances the computer and video arcade game experience and the home and business interactive multimedia experience. Real sound is natural, alive and everywhere. To create a virtual world of live sound and action, VIDI developed the Digital SoundStage with 3D Sound, a revolution in digital pre-production and production.
Presenter Professional is the first program that gives sound the elements of distance, velocity, and direction. Special 3D microphones are the hallmark feature within Presenter Professional's Digital SoundStage™. They can be placed anywhere in a 3D scene, assigned a sensitivity level, range, and a directional cone with sound falloff, and may even be animated. Sounds that are further away are faint. As they approach, they become louder. If they are moving fast as they pass the 3D microphones, they are altered by the Doppler effect (which changes the pitch of a sound as it moves toward or away from the listener). The microphones can play into the right, left or mono audio channels to simulate sounds coming from different parts of a scene.
This makes it easy to create animations with very realistic sound--without costly on-location recording or painstaking audio post-production. This is a capability currently not seen in any other product. Most sound used in 2D and 3D graphics is actually two-dimensional. Like PacMan chomping across the screen, the noise never gets closer or farther away and there is no sense of velocity or position. If you close your eyes, the sound seems to come form directly in front of your face. With Presenter Professional, when you close your eyes, you can actually imagine a jet roaring overhead, then disappearing into the distance. While at first this seems like a special effect, once you are used to it, other kinds of sound seem flat and unnatural.
The 3D Sound tutorial demonstrates how sound is recorded in 3D to produce the Doppler Effect. In the Doppler Train example, the 3D Sound effect for the train moving from right to left moving actually moves from the right stereo speaker to the left speaker. Giz'sBouncin Balls.Movie is an example of 3D sound effects produced automatically whenever the ball hits a surface. It compliments of Gary Reisman. T/P/A.Movie shows the effects produced by a moving train, race car, and jet and is compliments of Chuck Holland.
