Topic: creating a 'quad' / '5.1' mix

[ellaguru]

does anyone have any advice how to create a 'quad' or '5.1' mix from a multi track source?  wanting to take some stuff ive recorded and try it in multi channel playback.

thanks!

chris

[stantheman1976]

Are you talking about 2 SBD and 2 mic channels or a track of every channel off the board?  If it's a 4 channel SBD+MIC mix this show in Kickdown Central explains how he did the mic in his info file:
http://taperssection.com/index.php/topic,114078.msg1526356.html#msg1526356

If it's a track of every board channel Audition or Vegas allows you to choose where every channel goes.

[ghellquist]

Obviously there are several steps to this.

First you need to capture the sound. If you are planning for "surround" you would probably need several microphones. Not much use otherwise. Choice of microphones and placement becomes interesting then. You might choose just any setup and see what happens, or go by already tested setups. The state of art is not quite as fixed here as when it comes to stereo, but if you google a bit you will definitely find several suggested setups.

Secondly you need to mix it up nicely. It is rather obvious to me that if you want to mix surround, your mixing place needs to have surround capability. Quite a few software mixing programs supports this, perhaps as built-in or as en extra cost option. You will in this stage need a soundcard with sufficient amount of outputs, 4 or 6 depending on where you are going. Sadly, it will not work with the typical 5-1 soundblaster card as you cannot generally access all the outputs separately. Again, there are a lot of sound cards to choose from. You will also need enough loudspeakers to be able to listen to the result, 4 or 6 depending on where you are going. And while you are at it, please do some basic acoustic treatment of your listening position. It is very difficult to accurately judge the results if the listening room has too much of standing waves and flutter echoes.

Thirdly, once you are finished with your mix, you need to transfer it to the rest of the world. I looked at this a long time ago and gave up on it. If I understand it right, coding for Dolby 5-1 takes a very expensive (patented) encoder which Dolby holds very tight to the chest. Only accessible way for me was to go to a mastering house having this and paying the fees. Maybe there are other ways open now. Another route may be to go to DVD-Audio disc. But to tell the truth, I gave up there.

Perhaps other users on this forum has better experiences.

// Gunnar

[ellaguru]

any tips on how to do it in vegas/audition?

[ellaguru]

^

[Gutbucket]

Thirdly, once you are finished with your mix, you need to transfer it to the rest of the world. I looked at this a long time ago and gave up on it. If I understand it right, coding for Dolby 5-1 takes a very expensive (patented) encoder which Dolby holds very tight to the chest. Only accessible way for me was to go to a mastering house having this and paying the fees. Maybe there are other ways open now. Another route may be to go to DVD-Audio disc. But to tell the truth, I gave up there.

Besides DVD-A you could check out DTS encoding.  The software is considerably less expensive than Dolby. The newest DTS lossless version (whatever it's called) is more expensive than the basic encoder but still much less than Dolby. You could burn DTS DVDs, DTS encoded CDs, or just distribute the DTS encoded file which will play through a software decoder in a computer player (foobar, winamp, etc).  There may even be free encoder plugins but I haven't looked.

There are probably other surround encoders like Ogg extensions and the like if you dig into it.