I am mixing a project with surround. Obviously, the only way is to set up the project as a Dolby Atmos project first and foremost and then downmix to the speaker setup I have.
So here is what I did:
Create a new control room output “Quadro + LFE” (my physical speaker setup)
Create Dolby Atmos Renderer Channel
Create Dolby Atmos Objects and Beds as needed
Insert Supervision and MixconvertV6 in the Control Room for monitoring
Now what I notice is that the rear channels are routed wrong. Right rear is not working, and the Center is not mixed down to Left and Right (turns inaudible). This happens either if Mixconvert is inserted or not - it makes no difference.
When I set this up as a physical output instead and use MixconvertV6 just as before, everything works as expected.
This is some confusing behavior and I’ve poured hours into this trying to find the culprit.
Is Multi Monitor Output in Control Room broken in some way?
okay something is screwed up. after I had closed and opened this project a couple of times, suddenly, the speaker configuration was off.
I did not touch the control room output configuration
I did not delete any atmos objects
I did not mess with any other settings
I did not switch the Mixdown preset
For some weird reason, Nuendo started to interpret Right Rear as Front Right. How does that happen? After I re-assigned the outputs to the exact same outputs (just unassign - then reassign them again) - the speaker configuration worked again!
Something is murky here. I can’t imagine nobody else having some weird issues with Atmos in Nuendo. I know the 14.0.40 update brought some Atmos bugs - but I thought they would be fixed with the recent update (14.0.41).
Just throwing a couple of things out there… too tired to think further than this…;
I’m not sure if I understand your routing, what your mixconvert is using as input for example. But the one thing I would be wondering about is which device should do downmixing, if it might be best to let the Renderer do it instead - as an intermediate to 5.1 for example and then from there to your Quad+LFE using built-in downmixing.
The downmix functionality is now integrated into the Control Room it seems. As I posted before, you can access these downmix presets in the Main tab of the control room panel window.
The problem has solely to do with Control Room.
I have been closing and opening Nuendo a couple of times now and it seems stable for now.
I fixed this temporarily by adding a send to the LFE → My regular SFX group - I will, however have to turn these sends off as soon as I monitor on a setup with LFE or export the project to avoid unnecessary gain increase to the LFE.
I think you’re either not thinking about this the right way or you made a mistake in your setup at some point.
Just to quickly test this out I did the following;
Basic routing:
One 7.1.2 main Atmos Bed group track
One 7.1.4 main output bus with the Renderer on it
One 7.1.4 group track
One mono group track, output directly to the LFE childbus of the 7.1.2 Atmos Bed
One 7.1.4 speaker output
One Quad+LFE speaker output with the quad+lfe downmix preset enabled
Signal flow:
One mono audio track with test generator routed to 7.1.4 output, then made into an object. This pans correctly into the 7.1.4 path and the QuadLFE after downmix. In other words it correctly translates / downmixes all panning in the 7.1.4 field to QuadLFE. Rear Left goes to Rear Left, Top Rear Right goes to Rear Right, and so on.
One mono audio track with test generator routed to the mono group track, which goes straight to the 7.1.2 LFE channel. This correctly goes into the LFE in Control Room in both the 7.1.4 speaker path and QuadLFE LFE path.
I am not using “MixconvertV6” for anything, just using the standard downmix preset.
Yes, this is exactly my configuration, but when I look at Supervision (loaded into the CR Insert), it seems that Nuendo is downmixing everything into four speakers, routing the Rear Left into the LFE, and Rear Right is routed into Rear Left:
I have no idea what that metering represents because I can’t see the rest of the routing nor the source and panning.
(Obviously you need a downmix preset that matches the channel configuration. I would never expect Quad to downmix properly into QuadLFE. I think you need QuadLFE.)
I don’t think it is.
At least for post I think it’s pretty common to dedicate a path for the LFE channel to be able to control it separately (filtering etc.). So for me it makes sense to get signals to the LFE group track any way you want but have that be an LFE “master” and set its output directly to an LFE childbus in an Atmos Bed track.
Exactly. This is something that the user can’t see because it is managed under the hood. How do you create these Control Room presets at all? It seems they are fixed and supplied out-of-the box by Steinberg.
I was talking about your routing. Not what’s “under the hood”. If you post a meter how are we supposed to make sense of that? We can’t see if the source is a mono, stereo or multichannel signal, we can’t see its panning, we don’t know what tracks are involved or if they are objects or beds, we don’t see which downmixing procedure you’re using - if it’s just the downmix preset or if you’re using a plugin… A meter says nothing.
Does it matter at this point?
What you say you wanted to do seems to work for me the way I explained it and set it up. It does not seem like you set things up the way I did, therefore it seems like you made a mistake in your setup. The only way to know if that’s the case is if you explain, in detail, step by step, clearly, what you’ve done. If you did set it up the way I did then it would be very weird since it seems to work for me yet not for you.
Or, I am not understanding what you want to do or what the problem is.
Again, I can take a mono signal and make it into an object and have a 7.1.4 main output path with the Renderer on it, and with that as my source the automatic downmix preset to Quad+LFE correctly pans the signal into a Quad+LFE speaker output, and I can get the LFE signal into the LFE channels of both the 7.1.2 bed and the speaker output in Quad+LFE.
I don’t think that’s the problem since the speaker configuration is displayed properly in Supervision, which receives and recognizes this configuration directly from the Atmos Renderer.
One Quad+LFE speaker output with the quad+lfe downmix preset enabled
Yes, that is pretty much what I’m doing. I defined a bunch of Stereo tracks, 20 Mono tracks that I can pan freely and then a bunch of “Quick and Easy” Stereo tracks that are fixed in the Center Rear and 100% Rear (e.g. for some atmosphere sounds that just play through a scene) and don’t need to be automated.
