My setup is 7.1.4, and I’m wanting to first add four objects to my mix which will serve as TFL, TFR, TLS and TRS speakers (the standard Atmos bed only has two height inputs, so for what I’m trying to do I’m ignoring them for now - and I created four objects that will serve as individual height inputs for the four corners.) So far so good.
My goal is to pan the stereo pad between the front and rear height objects, preserving LR integrity in the process. To try to simplify the panning while keeping the sound in stereo as it moves from front to back, I created a group with quad input and sent the pad stereo track to it, and created the pan automation there. So far, so good, I’ve got the track panning forward and back in the quad group.
Here’s where I get lost - I need to send the quad height group output to the individual objects - and I’m not sure how to do that easily. Basically, the whole idea here is to be able to use four objects to allow discreet front and rear stereo height speakers to be used/activated if the listening environment has such a setup. If the listener doesn’t have individual height speakers for each corner, the signal would be downmixed via Atmos to the two standard height channels, which I’m ignoring/not trying to place sound in for now in this scenario, btw).
What essentially I’m trying to do is to pair or group objects to act as their own field - in this case, a “height field” - and then send stereo tracks to that field and then move them forward or back. Thanks in advance for trying to help me figure out this puzzle!
From what I have now experienced, the best way to approach this is to grab the pad in the Renderer as a Stereo Object. In the panner keep it pinned all the way to the top. Pan that from front to rear and be sure to keep the “object size” at 0. This should maintain the sound to be only coming from the height speakers and create that “ceiling wash effect” you are going after. The quad group will only cause issues since the beds will not support it up top.
Just noticed the “two” stereo pairs you mentioned.
To stack them you can create another stereo group to mix them both into and reference that as your object. If you want to maintain a spread distance on the ceiling from front to rear between them, just use the “line automation tool” and draw the pan of the second across the same number of measures starting and ending at the desired distance between them. Sorry for the run on sentence btw lol!
Unless I’m missing something this seems pretty straight forward.
I created a Quad Group that goes into the 7.1.4 Group.
I created a mono audio track that goes into the Quad Group.
I created a stereo audio track that goes into the Quad Group.
I created an object in the renderer dialog and chose the Quad Group as a source.
(By default this took all four channels and spanned them across four available objects.)
I then just increased elevation to maximum on the Quad Group’s panner. Now those four channels hit the top channels only.
I can now pan the audio tracks as expected. The mono can pan into the Quad group to any individual channel (and thus top speaker) or a combination of them, and the stereo track is easy to keep ‘locked’ in stereo by simply using the knob for front / rear to move the sound between the front pair and the rear pair.
This worked like a charm! I was soooo close to figuring this out myself - the only step I missed was creating the Quad group and bringing it in as an object. Thank you!!
So… SUCCESS!! I was able to create the ADM Wav file from the PC Nuendo Atmos Renderer. Then I took that file and used my mac-based Dolby stand alone renderer to create an MP4. I was then able to play the file after importing into iTunes and playing back using AppleTV. It worked!
Here’s the (no video) MP4 file if you want to try it out yourself - it’s not some musical masterpiece, it’s just some electronic/Tangerine Dream-ish type of stuff. But the major things to notice are that the pad sound travels from front to back and back to front smoothly and continuously - and the other stuff bounces around the room all over the place, including up and down through the height channels.
WARNING: Although the levels are recorded on average around -12db, please start your system at low volume and increase until you achieve a level you are comfortable at. The content does not have any super-loud audio surprises, it’s pretty much constant volume throughout. As always with any file you get from the Internet, user beware. This file has been checked for viruses and is virus-free.
Thank YOU for listening! I’m really excited - I feel like I can take on more robust projects now using Atmos. I definitely want to expand on what music sounds like in 3D space, at least that’s my goal. The Atmos environment is an instrument of its’ own. I am currently learning to play it!
