Hi all,
Just wanted to mention that the video for the Atmos version of “David” by Low Roar track was shot at the same time as the video about the stereo mix. Due to a bunch of stuff it has only come out now, which means that the video is a couple of years old.
Because of that, some of the technical details I talk about in terms of how my session is set up for object beds and things like that have changed.
The mix is still awesome though and I wouldn’t change a thing!
Thanks,
Andrew
Hello Andrew! Thank you for sharing, especially something you’re so close to. Would you mind elaborating about how your objects/beds are set up now versus how you shared in the videos? Even if it’s just philosophically. Thank you for your time.
Hi Steven,
Here’s the very long and detailed explanation…
My speaker setup is 9.1.4.
In the video I was using the built-in 7.1.2 bed, plus a stereo send to get to the wide speakers and a quad send to get to the four heights speakers. So if I wanted something just up top and I wasn’t worried about front-back up there, I would use the bed, otherwise I would use my quad send.
It worked but was definitely clumsy. The other thing is that if most of your audio is going through this abject bed, you have very little control over the Dolby binaural distance metadata which is a pretty major part of the binaural mix. I had to set the distances for each channel of the bed. So the front was set to Off, wides set to Near, sides to Med and rears to Far. This caused weird level and timbre shifts when panning since you were not only panning between positions, but also distance settings.
Sooooo, why didn’t I just use objects? Because 99% of the time you have stereo mixes that are finished and mastered and that’s what you’re trying to match in terms of feel. Other than EQ, one of the things that gets changed the most in mastering tends to be the limiting which really affects how transients, especially drums, feel. That means I need to be able to limit the “mix buss” (which is what an object bed really is) so I can get the groove the same.
Which leads me to my current setup, which is four 9.1.6 object beds. One set for each binaural metadata distance. This way if I decide I want something set to a particular distance I can just change the track’s output to that object bed and the pan stays the same as whatever object bed it used to be assigned to. Again, I usually need to do some sort of limiting to match the feel, so plugins on master faders for the four object beds makes this really easy to apply to get it right.
I also use objects, but usually that’s only only for elements that I want to move dynamically, as this will translate better than things being panned around in the object beds. I won’t go into the technical details of why, but take my word for it.
Hope this isn’t all too confusing!
Thank you very much for sharing!
Thanks for updating us! If there are any significant changes, would it be possible for someone to post the current software updates somewhere? It can be in notes, or in the community forum, just so that we know what the most current updates are.