Pro tools surround sound mixing book

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In addition, the included DVD provides audio examples of the concepts illustrated in the book, and interviews with professionals working in the multichannel business round out the instruction. Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. More Details Friend Reviews.

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Sort order. Chris Stanley rated it liked it Sep 21, Gabriel rated it liked it Jan 16, Bo Blount rated it really liked it Nov 20, Brian Elbl marked it as to-read Apr 07, There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Then route pink noise to the left front speaker and adjust the level of the pink noise to an easily read amount, say 80dB SPL. Then mute the feed to that speaker and route the pink noise to each of the speakers in turn, adjusting the level going to that speaker until the sound-level meter reads 80dB SPL.

If you have the Waves Bundle , it makes this calibration process a lot easier, as one of the elements of the Bundle , M Manager , enables you to easily solo each feed and to fine-tune all the levels. Remember to save the settings for future use!

This subject is so enormous I could easily fill this entire issue, and more, working through the subject. To get you going, though, here a few ideas. The reason for this is that most reverbs and panners are configured for 5. Resist the temptation to use the LFE track: it is really only intended for special effects in films, like earthquakes! Most broadcast and music work is usually 5. When mixing, always try to use a surround reverb plug-in. Digidesign's Revibe is an excellent surround reverb, and I reckon quite a lot of you will have it by now as a result of the plug-in offer Digidesign made with the v7 upgrade deal.

Try it out and feel the sound envelop you just like it does in real life. Other surround reverbs include Waves' R , which is also included in the Bundle , while there are surround-capable convolution reverb plug-ins like TL Space from Trillium Labs and Altiverb from Audio Ease. In stereo mixes you can use the pan control to position a sound within the stereo soundstage. Likewise, in surround you can pan a sound source anywhere in the surround soundfield, but doing so requires several controls to be adjusted simultaneously.

Help is at hand, courtesy of the Digidesign Surround Panner, which allows you to route and position a stereo track in the surround soundstage. To use the Digidesign Surround Panner, click on the miniature fader button just above the meters of the appropriate track in the Mix window, and the Surround Panner window will open.

From here you can position a sound source as you would with a conventional pan control. As you move the green dot around the box, you'll see all the channel pan controls moving in different ways, and it doesn't stop there. The Surround Panner has an extra set of controls at the bottom of the window called Divergence.

Reducing the Divergence control will route some of that track into the adjacent speakers, so 'spreading' the sound. Another surround panner is S Panner from the Waves Bundle. To use this, select it from an available insert on a channel. Waves offer a Width control rather than a Divergence control, which I find more intuitive to use. One of the limitations of Pro Tools LE systems is that you can only create mono or stereo tracks. You do not get the option to create tracks in multi-channel formats such as 5.

All is not lost, though, and with a little 'out of the box' thinking you can produce surround mixes with a or R system — the M Box only has two analogue outputs so you will have no way to monitor a surround mix from one! You will need a single control to change the volume of all six output channels.

Then create master faders for these outputs and group them together and there you have it, a 5. LCR panning is tricky, but for music production in surround there is very little need for LCR panning. Route audio to the front stereo and surround stereo to taste, and use an aux send to route small amounts of things like kick, snare and bass to the centre channel.

You can do the same for vocals if you prefer not to use the centre speaker, or you can do the opposite: send the vocals to the centre channel and add a little to the front stereo to help spread the sound, maybe with a little delay. With the limitations of LE, surround reverbs are not an option so you are going to have to use stereo reverbs creatively. Try a shortish reverb into the front channels and a longer reverb, preferably using the same algorithm, but with a larger space with less pre-delay, into the surround channels.

Upmixing is the name given to taking a stereo mix and creating a surround mix from it. Increasingly, clients are asking for their back catalogues to be remixed into surround for DVD release, so I thought it would be useful to include here some tips on how to do it and some pitfalls to avoid. Here is an example of how not to do it. It may seem sensible at first but I hope you will see the reasons why it does not work.

For the front speakers, route the stereo input to the front left and right outputs. For the centre channel, mix the stereo input to mono and filter the low and very high frequencies to emphasise the dialogue or vocal and adjust the level to suit. For the surround channels take the stereo input, filter out the middle frequencies, add some delay with a bit of modulation and mix in at low level.

Two surround panners: Digidesign's own, and the Waves S plug-in. So what is wrong with that, you might ask? Well, first, you don't want dialogue or vocals coming out of the surround channels. However much EQ you use, you are still going to get some dialogue or vocal-related sound in the surround channels, which will sound very bizarre.

Also, sending a filtered version to the centre channel will lead to comb-filtering effects, while if the listener at home is listening to a downmixed stereo version of this mix, then any delay in the rear channels will produce very interesting flanging and phasing effects! Finally, remember that the LFE channel is for special effects and is not a sub-bass channel.

Domestic systems will handle the bass management. So how should you do it? It's arguable that if all you have is a stereo mix you should leave it alone: any upmixing that is subsequently downmixed will give a degraded sound, because you can't predict what will happen to your mix once it has left your studio. However, if upmixing is what the client wants, there are a few tricks available to you.

Route the left and right inputs to the LtRt inputs of the decoder plug-in, take the LCRS outputs and route them to the appropriate channels. This will produce a reasonably mono- and stereo-compatible mix. You might want to add some stereo spread to the mono surround output to give some spread to the surround channel, but always check what it does to a downmixed version of your mix. One thing you will need to do is to compensate for the Dolby decoding process: this puts some delay in the surround output, so you will need to either slip the surround channel back or delay the other outputs.

If you don't, when the listener hears it through their system there will be the additional delay to the delay added by their own system, and in a downmixed version of your mix we will get that flanging or phasing effect again. This can work as well as or better than a Dolby decoder, but to get the best results from it you will need to adjust the settings individually for each scene or track.

Note that the two will need to be precisely in sync: audio derived from analogue sources such as tape will drift too much for this to work reliably.

If you can get back to the original stereo session it is much better to start there, assuming you've got more than a few hours. You can make much better choices of how to route the various elements into the surround soundstage, and where available, you can use surround reverbs instead of stereo ones.