Hi everyone,
I am brand new to this forum (today) and this is my first post.
I am very interested in creating video as well as audio (and putting the two together of course).

My main focus is in 3d video. I use several different freeware (windows) apps in my process.
mainly anim8or (for the 3d modeling and avi creation)
Wax or Jahshaka to manipulate the video (add extra lighting or other special effects)

Paint.net (sometimes I render frames as images and tweak them individually)
StopIt! (to recompile those images into an avi file)

non freeware items that I use for my process:
adobe audition 1.5 for manipulating the sound files
Finale (for creating the music tracks).

So, down to my question.
I have been able to make my vids into full on dvds that can be burned and played in any stand alone dvd player, a feat that took me weeks of research to learn how to do, but I am missing one item.

I want to get into adding surround sound to my videos.
I've been searching around here and I see lots of great tips on editing pre-existing files surround sound. But what about those of us who are starting from scratch?
Adobe has a 'cute' multichanel tool that has a visual representation. I have my laptop headphone jack plugged to an rca converter to my home theater system. I can get surround sound when playing dvds using VLC, but, I can not get adobe to output that way so that I can test my sound.

I also have never had any success saving a surround sound file and putting it together with a video file to get it to play with the dvd.

Any ideas for my specific case what I might try (hopefully with free or open source tools)?
Thanks in advance
Sage

edit:: I realized that my title was not exactly descriptive of what my question portion was, so, I came back to try to edit it to give a better title. Unfortunately, I do not see a way to edit the title or description. Sorry about that, I will make sure to be more descriptive next time.

i wouldn't try to author dolby digital 5.1 with free tools, but that is just me, if you really want to try then:

a. export from audition as 6ch wav (if not then export each channel separately), then there is
b. aften http://aften.sourceforge.net/ & gui http://kurtnoise.free.fr/index.php?dir=Aften/

Maybe an admin can change the title to "How can I add surround sound to my videos?"

Thanks kwanbis,
hopefully an admin will read and do that for me.

Smok3,
thank you too for your answer, I grabbed those programs. Having trouble compiling, but I'll get that figured out later when I have more time to figure out what my problem is, but it does look like it is just what I am looking for.

Thanks again,
Sage