ITU 775 5.1 Surround Stems

[dragonbudo]

Hi. I wonder if anyone can help?

 

Bouncing down a 118 track surround mix to six stems. They're not meant to be written to disk, but reopened in Logic with a piece of film for evaluation.

 

Trouble is, I'm getting six identical stems, and when they're played back... well you can imagine.

 

Bounce settings are:

 

WAV

 

16 bit

 

48000

 

Split

 

Apogee UV22HR

 

Surround Bounce (on)

 

(PCM - On / Normalize - Off)

[fader8]

Solo the tracks for the first stem. Bounce. Repeat for all stems. No, there isn't a quicker way.

[dragonbudo]

Solo the tracks for the first stem. Bounce. Repeat for all stems. No, there isn't a quicker way.

 

I know what you're saying, but I think that only really works when you've got very definitive audio, such as a band or an orchestra.

 

With film, and a hundred and eighteen tracks, there are multiple tracks that are very similar and sometimes have identical surround panning.

 

I guess it just comes down to keeping clean Center and LFE channels. I've done this and it has helped a bit.

 

Would love to know if there are any professional surround guys out there with an opinion on this?

 

Thanks fader 8.

[crimsonnoise]

Are your stems set up as six surround buses? You could then set up six surround audio tracks, and choose the respective buses as your inputs, then record those.

 

Edit: reading your original post again - do mean mean you end up with six identical TRACKS (rather than STEMS?), or do you really mean stems (which would mean a total of 6x6=36 tracks)?

[fader8]

Are your stems set up as six surround buses? You could then set up six surround audio tracks, and choose the respective buses as your inputs, then record those.

I assumed that dragonbudo hadn't set up dedicated busses for each stem. While that's certainly the "conventional" approach, we don't know if any reverb returns, etc., are shared across tracks of different stems. If there is, then that return would need to be temporarily assigned to the stem sub, and various tracks muted. Otherwise you might end up with foley reverb in the dialog stem!

 

So, sometimes it's best to "bounce" the stems separately (even when using stem subs) and have dedicated "Solo-Only" groups for stem tracks, with the returns assigned across multiple groups. This way the source tracks that don't belong to that stem are muted during the render. (Assuming all effects sends are postfader.) The stem then includes any final processing (and levels) there may be on the master channel.