is it somehow possible to export stems and groups, which share the the same stereo bus / masterbus (like in music production), in one pass?
The thing is, I want to print all the master effects on each stem (I know the behaviour is different when hitting all the dynamic processors and limiter with just one group / stem).
When I use the export queue function (including master effects), it also processes each group after group. So it takes way to much time…
I need something like the multi channel export including the master effects chain.
This would be to nice to be true.
Unfortunately I think (know) this is technically not possible, right? …so I have answered my own question now.
But maybe someone has some clever tips and tricks, intelligent routing template, etc. to fasten up the whole stem exporting thing.
I think some people use side-chaining to sort of get around it. I guess you’d have to have one path to sum all signals and then use that as a source for the side-chains. Best practice is to not do this for post… as far as I can see anyway…
FYI, when printing FINAL mixes, I always take the time to LISTEN extra carefully to the master mix, any alternate versions, and any sub mixes, stems, etc.
You do these once and then turn them in to the label / artist.
Letting the computer do it for you while unattended, always has the potential for something wrong to happen, and it will reflect on you poorly.
Take the time to care about your work enough to do it right. Cheers.
Normally yes, I agree.
But in this case it is all about speed.
I’m composing music for media and in this actual case for a game. I have to do lots of cues including stems in a short period of time.
It also sometines happens, that you have to rework approved cues and therefore do the stem bounce several times.
So unfortunately I don’t get paid for sitting there, doing stems by hand for half an hour, one hour, or maybe two hours per cue…
Time is money
Maybe I should just don’t care about the masterbus effects and go with the multi channel export, as all the stems get mixed and finalized anyway in the game engine.
I think the fastest most predictable and best way to go about it is to just not have effects on the final master and instead put those on the stems during mixing. Annoying, I know, but at least you’re then guaranteed that the stems will equal the mix. Like I said, you’d otherwise have to figure out a way to create a sidechain signal to trigger dynamic processing on each stem.
Well, if you process the individual STEMS through the master buss, then your STEMS are useless.
Since they will all have a different amount of processing going individually through the Master Buss effects.
The way to go is creating oututs for all of your “deliveries”.
-Master Out (In your case, maybe with Buss processing)
-STEM - Horns
-STEM - Drums
-STEM -Whatever
-Etc …
That way you can export all of them in one export.
If you need to make changes, just use your stems, and route them through your Master Out with processing. Then, and only then, you will obtain the same result.
Just to be clear though - the ‘old’ problem still persists in that the stems don’t equal the summed mix if there’s heavy processing on the master. So from the perspective of a mix engineer (or others) it could be a problem if they sign off on the summed mix and then receive stems that doesn’t sound like the mix.
In Post this is a problem. We never use Master Buss processing for that exact reason.
In music production, I can see why master Buss processing is required.
That being said, in Music, the client never asks for STEMS.
So if this only is for the mix engineers’ convenience, then he needs STEMS without processing.
For post work, I set up all my stems as Groups that I export from under the Multiple tab in Audio Mixdown and don’t use any ‘master bus’ processing beyond that. Instead, I duplicate the master bus processes on each stem group and they all sum together to another Full Mix group, so at export, I can kick out the Full Mix and each stem as two passes in the Export Queue (I actually do three - I mix the episodes to -23 LUFS and then use Nuendo’s ‘Normalize To Integrated Loudness’ feature, which typically does an amazing job at exporting an additional YouTube spec mix as well (-14 LUFS / -1.0 Max True Peak).
