I've read many articles from Steve Guttenberg (not the actor)
, and he really seems to know his stuff. If he was at that event and says that it will be in Dolby Atmos, I'd say it's probably true, and I find this to be very heartening for a great surround mix, possibly.*
If your setup is capable of playing Dolby TrueHD and you
don't have an Atmos setup, it will automatically sum down the Atmos to regular TrueHD 7.1, and if you only have a 5.1 setup, it will automatically fold down the 7.1 information into 5.1 for your setup, and if you don't have the capabilities of even playing TrueHD, it will sum that down to standard dolby digital. It's really quite amazing how versatile and backwards compatible it is. I've heard several Atmos mixes summed down to TrueHD 7.1 on my setup, and pretty much every one of them sound amazing with extremely impressive surround stuff going on.
In the home environment, Atmos is capable of up to a 7.1.4 setup configuration:
7 - left front, right front, center, left side surround, right side surround, left rear surround, right rear surround
1 - LFE (low frequency effects) channel (subwoofer/s)
4 - left front ceiling, right front ceiling, left rear ceiling, right rear ceiling
There is most definitely a 'trickle-down' effect from taking the hugely complex Atmos mix and summing it down to even 5.1, so just by virtue of the fact that Atmos is hopefully included as an audio option, it bodes well for the possibility of a very high quality active mix.
* Any mix whether mono or Atmos is done by an actual real person. Said person can do an amazing job or a terrible job. Said person can do a conservative mix or an insanely adventuresome mix.