I could be wrong, but I think you have your definitions wrong.

Here is how I understand it. Stereo means each speaker is spitting out different info. Mono means exactly the same info is coming out of every speaker.

So if you have a character on the left side of the screen you increase the volume on the left speaker and decrease it on the right speaker and it sounds like he's on the left. If he's talking to someone in the middle the left and right side speaker volumes may be roughly matched.

If you're watching on a tv without surround sound this will be minor. In a theater the difference will probably be large. So what I'm saying is think of the stereo vs mono equation in terms of the movie, and not the specific sounds. Think stereo stereo stereo. Recreate stereo in post if you have to.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

Actually, in my experience dialogue usually comes from the center speaker. I suspect stereo dialogue gets too confusing when you're cutting from one shot to another.

I'm sure you're right if you have lots of cuts and don't have both speakers onscreen all the time it'd get confusing. Still if both folks were onscreen at once and you kept the same one to the left on each cut the confusion would be minimized.

If you did one of those handheld camera moves that spin around a character and often denote the character being overwhelmed or confused would be hightened if the noise/discussion that is overwhelming them were spinning as well. Possible even in the opposite way to really muck up the viewers perceptions.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

How the sound is recorded it is usually up to the sound recordist. Stero or mono, I guess if the quality of the recording is as high as it can be then mono will take half the space of a stero file.

How you record it will only determine how it is imported into your mixing sofwtare or your editing software. If you are using Premiere Pro, and have a 5.1 master track (which means you can now move the sounds around the 5.1 sound field) it doesn't matter if it is stereo or mono, especially if you move it to a specific channel.

Dolby has some great documentation on the mixing soundtracks for 5.1 It does talk about what should and shouldn't go into each channel. But once you are at the stage of mixing the sounds together and moving them in and out of speaker channels in order to get the best sound field possible, then stereo or mono doesn't matter too much.

It you are using a XLR Microphones that plug into the camera, if you have two ports you can assign each one into a seperate channel. Then when you capture the footage you will need to put this into your audio editing software to split the file into to 2 seperate files.

Dolby has come great documents on mixing for 5.1 presentation but it won't talk about the number of channels to capture the source at, just what should go where. ?url? http://www.dolby.com/resources/tech_library/index.cfm ?/url?
Some great document there if you want to know about Dolby Technologies. DTS, another 5.1 but I haven't found as much information about their mixing guidlines, but there site is here ?url? http://www.dts.com?/url?. The other one used is SDDS. The Sony one, there are some interesting information there as well at ?url? http://www.sdds.com?/url?. But encoders for DTS and SDDS on a small scale are difficult to fine. I think that the latest version of Final Cut pro may have a an encoder in it. But SDDS is something that is done with hardware.

I hope this helps.

Michael Rogers
McRogson