Hi everyone - I’ve just finished my first 360RA music test mix. Here’s my experience….
Installation: No problems (there doesn’t appear to be a trial). Support was very good, they responded within an hour of emailing them regarding the error reported earlier in the thread (now fixed).
Setting up: Fairly straightforward. Drop the plugin on the output bus (it then asks if this is the output bus - you say yes and close and forget about it). Then drop the plugin in the last insert channel of every channel you want to work with. Oh, and remember to turn the plugin on! I was wondering why nothing was happening until I noticed the power button on the plugin. And make sure the ‘headphones’ icon is selected if working binaurally. Everything works pre-fader so working with exported stems (including FX) is definitely the easiest way to work.
In use: Only one instance of the plugin needs to be open to work with every object in the session. If you are used to the Steinberg 3D panner, the 360 panner can take a bit of getting used to. It works with azimuth and elevation, which is fine for spinning and whirling things up and around the head, not so easy for passing things from front to back, left to right or over the top/bottom. Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but the nature of the panner means that passing a linked stereo object through the middle will narrow to mono (when central) before expanding back to full stereo when in the rear. If you want to make a wide stereo track pass wide to the back, you have to unlock the stereo object and manually automate each side separately.
In reality, this wasn’t as hard as it sounds. I found that the best way to work with the panner in my session was to rely solely on automation. Once I knew what numbers to type in to send an object from a-b, it was very quick to get the results I was aiming for, especially when I wanted subtle tempo-locked movement of things like pads and delays around the 3D. I also found the results to be very convincing. I felt the movement was more discreet than the Atmos binaural downmix within Nuendo, but maybe it was just a better mix…
The other drawback of having all the objects in every instance of the plugin was that it gets very busy. I only had 36 objects, but it was already very hard to select the required object in the GUI. You also need to rename your objects within the plugin with short aliases if you want to keep the labels on, otherwise it’s a big mess of text. I would like to see the ‘solo’ button in the plugin solo the object in the GUI also. There is an option to go full screen with the plugin, which gives you a mixer view.
Rendering and distribution: In the settings of the plugin, you have to set the output path. Then just export as normal (24/48 stereo interleaved) to the same path you just set and make sure the 360 plugin is open also. Once the Nuendo wav has exported, the plugin then prompts you with an array of export options, including whether you want to normalise (loudness doesn’t seem to be a thing here). This is where I found the documentation a little lacking. I personally didn’t know what the ‘levels’ of MPEG-H meant, or what WAV-SAM was or what ‘Unprocessed’ meant. Upon a google it seems the ‘levels’ applies to how many channels the file supports, which I guess has implications for compression. Either way, the MP4 file generated wouldn’t play on my iphone or any player on my PC.
However, this didn’t matter as one of the output options is ‘headphone channels’. This creates a binaural WAV which you can distribute like any other WAV file and simply works.
Submission for official distribution looks a bit more involved than Atmos where I am used to simply handing over ADM files. I’d be interested if anyone here has any experience with this? The submission requirements can be found here: Submission Guidelines |
So overall I think the plugin is great. I like the way it’s been implemented and it sounds really convincing. It will be interesting to see what kind of takeup this has going forward…
Cheers
Bruce