Dolby has installed Atmos in The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in order to showcase its immersive sound system at CinemaCon, which opens Monday in Las Vegas.
Select footage during studio presentations from Disney, Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros. will play in Atmos this week in the venue, along with screenings of Disney/Pixar’s Monsters University and Fox’s The Heat.
If you remember the massive effort to install Atmos into the 3,400-seat Dolby Theatre last year for the format’s launch, you can appreciate that this temporary installation is an ambitious one.
The Colosseum spreads 240 feet at its widest point and has a 70-foot-wide screen that will be used at CinemaCon. Dolby vp worldwide production services David Gray — who also oversaw the installation at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood — says that CinemaCon will not use the venue’s second mezzanine, and so the audio booth is built on the first mezzanine the event will use an estimated 3,100 of the 4,100 seating capacity.
According to Gray, three screen channel arrays (left, center, right) consist of 10 QSC Wideline-10 speaker boxes and 3 QSC Wideline-218 speaker boxes per channel, and 12 QSC 7218 screen bass subs.
The installation also includes two 70-foot trusses for overhead surrounds and two 60-foot trusses for side surrounds. Each truss has eight speakers for a total of 32 speakers making up the overhead and side surrounds.
Six rear surround arrays consist of three QSC Wideline-8 speaker boxes and one QSC Wideline-212 speaker box per channel, and 28 additional surround speakers are placed for the mezzanine.
As installed here, the Atmos system is driven by power amplifiers producing a total of 485,000 watts, Gray reported.
Dolby, QSC, Boston Light and Sound, and the house crew at the Colosseum all worked together to install the Atmos system. The gear was brought in on Friday, and installation occurred over the weekend with the final speakers all hung by 3:30 a.m. and the first playback of Atmos at 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning.
Nearly 40 Atmos titles have been announced since the format was unveiled at CinemaCon in 2012, the latest are The Heat and Sony Pictures’s Elysium, the second feature from Academy Award-nominated writer-director Neill Blomkamp. Elysium opens Aug. 9.
Director Paul Fieg’s comedy The Heat was helmed by re-recording mixers Marc Fishman and Erin Rettig at the Zanuck Theatre on the Fox lot. It debuts June 28.
Roughly 100 theater auditoriums worldwide are now equipped with Atmos, as well as roughly 20 postproduction screening rooms including the Zanuck and Disney Stage A.
At CinemaCon, Dolby will showcase its Atmos Cinema Processor CP850 for digital cinema theaters, which was developed to render in real-time a mix for the given auditorium. The CP850 supports Dolby Atmos playback of up to 64 speaker feeds, as well as Dolby Surround 7.1 and 5.1 digital playback and Dolby formats used with alternative content in cinemas such as Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby E.
