This is a very interesting post on the Digidesign User Conference. When ever I have done 5.1 and stereo projects I have done two separate mixes, usually doing thee surround first and then doing a “Save As” and changing the bussing to stereo and doing another mix.
JonesH started by asking…
Sorry for asking newbie questions, but I can’t get my head around a good solution for this. I’m mixing a song in 5.1 and obviously want a stereo version as well. I’ve solved this my using one send (f) for the stereo balancing and panning, which goes to a stereo mix bus. I’ve bounced the reverbs in order to use the same machine more than once.
My question relates to mostly reverbs and some other 5.1 sources that I of course want to include in the stereo mix as well.Is there a good way to handle sending 5.1 tracks to stereo buses? From what I’ve found, there’s no way that I can make a 5.1 track send to a stereo bus. My very long-winded solution has been to take all the separate mono regions composing each 5.1 reverb recording, assigning them to a 5.1 bus output to use as a master fader for them in the surround mix while using a send from each mono track to the stereo mix.
This seems highly inelegant and wasteful of buses. Can you tell me if there’s a smarter way?
Soundthinker replied…
A slightly better approach is to create stereo and mono sub-paths of your 5.1 sources in your I/O setup. Then create two stereo and one mono Aux tracks. Assign the L-R, and Ls-Rs sub-paths to the stereo auxes and the C mono sub-path to the mono aux. The auxes are assigned to your stereo mix buss. Basically a no-plugin downmixer.
JonesH responded…
I think that’s essentially what I’ve done but with discrete mono tracks instead of using subpaths to make stereo tracks. Using two stereo tracks instead of four mono doesn’t make a big difference to me, it’s about the number of buses available and ease of mixing… For which I can use the mono version as well. Good idea though!
infinteloop chipped in with…
lotsa Neyrinck Soundcode LtRt. I use about 5 in my regular 5.1 / LtRt simultaneous template.
Any comments from folks here, it would be certainly something I would find useful to save time mixing as long as I can be confident that the stereo won’t become the poor partner in this.
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February 3, 2010 at 1:41 pm
I use it in a different context – for home monitoring 5.0 sessions while editing rather than for final mixing – but i’ll second the recommendation of the neyrinck soundcode LtRt