What’s your method for creating virtual ‘rooms’? Above all: how do you go about it when you have a scene shot from a first-person perspective, where a person is walking down a hallway and there are, for example, two sound sources in the room – such as two speakers playing the same music – both of which are mounted on the ceiling and are, say, 50 metres apart?
How do you organise this in terms of send buses / send effects, EQ (changing frequencies), reverb (changing pre-delay times) / changing positions relative to the sound sources?
How do you approach a scene where there is a smooth transition from a small room to a large hall? For example: Two people are chatting in a small kitchen located inside a warehouse. The door opens and a third person comes in, leaving the door open. Then the two people who were chatting leave the kitchen and walk slowly into the large warehouse. And all in a single cut, in one scene. How do you go about this?
The first thing to ask is: does it have to be binaural?
The reason for that is you don’t really get the exact positioning and placement of things on plain stereo because the channels are not isolated from each other. You’d only have the effect on headphones.
I find that in general less complicated processing often works very well, and I say that mainly as a listener. In other words, you could definitely have the same source on two tracks, set a doppler or delay effect to have them “peak” when the person is under respective speaker, and simply automate sends into a hallway reverb so that you get the right balance, possibly with shelf EQ or something. On the other hand it might suffice to just have the reverb and speaker level change as the person moves. I’d just try it and see if it works.
I’d probably set up the kitchen reverb as you would intuitively, and just have that FX return fade out as they leave. The warehouse I’d probably set up fully first, i.e. at the point when they’ve walked out into it, and then I’d work ‘backward’ to the closed kitchen door. My hunch is that I’d try with the reverb collapsed to mono in the panner and then just have the FX return for it go from -infinity to what’s reasonable when the door opens, and then as they move into the warehouse from the kitchen spread it out and increase level. I suppose if you wanted you could create two outputs of the reverb with one (mono) feeding the kitchen reverb as well., which might be acoustically more accurate, and then do the fade transition.
Again though, it might not be necessary to be all that fancy with it (i.e. collapsing pan spread).
More importantly: you’re likely going to get more answers in the Nuendo section than the Lounge.
Thanks, everyone. That’s exactly how I do it too. As I’m not primarily a sound designer and don’t have to do this every day, I thought I’d ask here to see how others go about it. And sorry, I’d forgotten to mention: I was talking about a stereo mix.