edboy7,

There is a lot of great information at dolby's web site (http://). Go to the drop down menu for "Information", then "Dolby Digital". You'll find a number of PDFs with more than you ever wanted to know about surround sound!

As far as standards for track assignments, even dolby seems to use two different configurations in their various documents. The two main ways to lay the tracks out seem to be L, C, R, Ls, Rs, LFE and L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs, with the second being the preferred method in most cases.
(L = left, R = right, C = center, Ls = left surround, Rs = right surround, LFE = Low Frequency Effects, or the subwoofer channel).

I worked for 5 years in a DVD authoring studio where we would receive DA-88 tapes with the 6 individual tracks for 5.1 encoding, and we would get several variations of the above. I can tell you from experience, however, that the MOST important thing - regardless of what order you decide to put them in - is to LABEL YOUR TAPE with the channel assignments and the level at which you calibrated your 1kHz tone.

Now, that said, your individual software package for encoding dolby digital may require that you have your multitrack set up in a certain order. The software/hardware that we used allowed you to route the tracks to wherever they needed to go.

Have fun!

Rob

thanks Rob, we'll master it on DA-88 but the whole movie is either on DA-88 or MO disc..i agree that proper labelling is a must..Dont wanna hear sounds the other way around

question?

what kind of sortware is generally used for mixing 5.1 music? I, as a hobby I must be frank, have just started mixing music and sound in 5.1 I'm currently using Sony's Acid pro, have you heard of this software and is it any good? Could you recommend another or am I better off starting out with this?

i think as long you can use or monitor 5.1 on acid you dnt have any problem just encode it using thishttp://www.surcode.com/flash_index.html...havent tried it coz we use the hardware provided by dolby :)