The mastering services available at Abbey Road extend beyond traditional stereo and surround mastering. We offer high definition (HD) mastering for broadcast projects and new formats for the home consumer such as Blu-ray.
High-Definition mastering for broadcast
Broadcasting in high definition means that you have the opportunity to deliver a surround sound audio stream alongside the pictures. This can be created either by a full studio mixing session, or by upmixing a stereo source to create a 5.1 or a 7.1 master. Abbey Road offers both services.
For Broadcast purposes, a 5.1 audio stream is generally encoded to a 2 channel Dolby E stream before layback to a video master.
High-Definition mastering for new formats
Abbey Road has always been at the forefront of new formats and technologies. In today's world this includes high definition mastering for formats such as Blu-ray discs. Blu-ray is a high-density optical disc format for the storage of up to 50GB of digital information, including high-definition video. As in High Definition broadcasting, you can have multi-channel audio streams alongside the High Definition pictures on a Blu-ray. Unlike standard definition DVDs, the audio does not have to be compressed, because there is more space on the new formats, so you can have a 5.1 or 7.1 audio mix in uncompressed PCM wave format, or to save space, you can use one of the new lossless encoding formats from Dolby and DTS.
Example projects
From the Basement for the Sky Arts channel. Producer Nigel Godrich.
- upmixed 2ch master to 5.1, plus multi-channel layback to HDCAM-SR via Dolby E encoder.
- 5.1 and Stereo mastered, prepared and laid back to tape in Room 13 for SD and HD-DVD release.
- 5.1 and Stereo mastered, prepared and laid back to tape in Room 13 for SD and HD-DVD release.
