5.1 or 2.0 or 2.1

[bira]

Hello !

Let's start!

Facts:

- Source: DV footage
- Target: DVD
- DV audio is stereo, but there little, if any, difference between the two channels
- I will add some music to the edited movie
- I will add director's commentary as a second audio track


Questions:

- Should I convert the DV audio to mono file and set it to the center channel?
- Should I set the music to the front channels?
- Can I filter the music and set the low frequencies to the LFE channel? If so, do I have to remove the low frequencies from the original music?

- Where should the director's commentary come from? Front? Center? Rear? LFE? (just kidding)

- Is it fine to have a 3.0 or 3.1 audio for a DVD compliant movie?

- If I encode as 5.1, can I leave the unused channels empty?


Thanks!!

[DIggedy]

As far as I'm aware, with ac3 you can use any combination of channels and bitrates... eg. 2.1, 3.1 etc
I would recommend leaving your audio in stereo, especially if your mixing music in. Yes you can filter out the low frequencies for use in an LFE channel... this can be done in any wav editing program (Cool Edit, Sound Forge etc).
As for director commentary I recommend you just have it in the centre channel. If you encode it as 1.0 you can get away with using a very low bitrate (especially since it will only be voice), say 96kbps or so. This way you can dedicate as much bandwidth as possible to the main audio and video.

[bira]

Thanks.

I need to have not only the director's commentary but also the main audio. So, I would have to mix it with the main audio.