Recently I sent my Dolby Atmos project off to a mixing engineer who uses Pro-Tools in their studio and was once again reminded of the odd behavior or Nuendo/Cubase of configuring the output files (interleaved) in only one specific order that cannot be changed: L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs (for 5.1 in this case)
However, whenever I work with a mixing engineer specialized in film content and DCP handoff, they usually expect this configuration: L, C, R, Ls, Rs, LFE which seems more common in film post audio production.
This was not the only instance where I had trouble with the channel order.
When giving my finished multichannel file to an artist for an immersive sound installation, we realized the audio player wasn’t interpreting the channels correctly. I spent hours analyzing the problem - until I figured out I can use a third-party audio editor like Audacity to swap around the channels.
I would like to have a way to specify my own configuration (or at least the one mentioned above).
The whole reason why I upgraded to Nuendo 2 years ago was actually these same difficulties. At the time, I thought Cubase is more aimed at music production and having Nuendo, things should go a little smoother. Well they’re just as annoying when it comes to handling multichannel exports.
I really wish for this to be improved in a future version.