Dolby Atmos for home studios in Cubase 12

hi the ability to create dolby atmos mixes was recently added to cubase 12. but what can you do with that in a home studio like this where you don't have a gazillion speakers at the same time i'm seeing and hearing that a lot of professional studios are converting their setup to be able to create dolby atmos mixes so what does that mean for the music that i produce in my home studio will i still be able to mix and distribute the mixes of my band in stereo or will everybody want dolby atmos mixes and do we have to go to a professional studio to get those made let's talk about it have a look at how this works in cubase 12 and get your headphones out [Music] [Applause] so what is dolby atmos really now from a listener perspective it's really the next evolution in how we perceive recorded sound because in nature in everyday life we hear sound coming from all around us and the sound that reaches our ears is interpreted by our brain and our brain can actually tell where the sound is coming from whether it's back there or right in front of me with music however we've always been listening in a very different way we basically hear the sound coming from the left and the right speaker and depending on whether a certain sound source is louder in the left or right speaker we even perceive it as if the sound source is somewhere in between those two speakers but that's really the way that we've been listening to music for the longest time it all started with just one single mono sound source somewhere in the time of the first recordings in the late 1800s all the sound came from that one speaker and somewhere in 1930 stereo sound was invented where you suddenly had the two speakers and that's really the way we've been listening to music for all this time now at some point also surround sound was introduced where you had speakers all around you for example you could have a 5.1 speaker setup or even a 7.1 speaker setup where the first number 7 is the number of speakers around you and the second number the 0.1 is really the low frequency speaker which is for the low frequencies which are not very directional so it doesn't really matter where it is however that format really never took off for music listening because you needed such an elaborate setup for it only the most fanatical music listeners would get a setup like that to listen to music and although there have been quite a lot of mixes in surround sound definitely not all music was available in that format and it's also not the format that we have on our vinyl on cassette tapes on our cds or even available from our digital distribution services all of that has still stuck to the stereo format for all of this time surround sound has become the norm in film theaters because they can just afford to build a setup like that in their movie theater now the next step immersive sound is where there's not just speakers around you but there's also speakers above you and again there's various formats for immersive sound but dolby atmos after its inception in 2012 already that's quite old already has become quite popular in that again mostly in film and movie theaters but now it's also starting to take off for music and suddenly you see mixing rooms like this from blackbird studios where the whole room has been set up and outfitted with many many speakers a more modest setup is a 7.1.4 speaker setup that is shown in this picture so you have seven speakers around you one low frequency effect channel and four overhead speakers to make the sound completely immersive so let's now have a look at what qbase offers for dolby atmos mixing but before i do that if you like this video or find it useful in any way please give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel it really helps and if you want to know when i publish another video you can push the bell icon so you get a notification and if you want to support the channel even more i have lots of affiliate links on the equipment that i use in this studio and if you buy something at any of those stores after clicking the link i will get a small commission without any extra cost to you but let's dive into cubase now now this is the example project that i want to use for this video and it fully consists of samples and loops that are coming from the laser beams library which is part of cubase 12. so let's have a listen to this beat which is quite monotonous but it'll serve fine for demonstration purposes [Music] and all of this is still in stereo if i look at audio connections you can see that i have an output bus in stereo and not connected because i'm using the control room to monitor it via this monitor setup now the main place where i usually start in making this into a dolby atmos mix is in project adm altering for dolby atmos now it is possible to use the setup assistant in this and this setup assistant can convert the whole project setup into a setup which is suitable for dolby atmos mixing but i'm not actually going to do this now because i think you can then miss what's going on behind the scenes in cubase and i want to show you how to manually set up a dolby atmos mix so that it's easier to understand what's happening and then once you understand how it works you can use the setup assistant to make this setup much quicker one thing that you see in the setup assistant though which is very important for your dolby atmos project is that you need to set up your ratio buffer size to 512 samples and that your project sample rate must be set to 48 kilohertz that's really required to make a dolby atmos mix in cubase 12 at this time so make sure you do that before you start with the other steps so let's start to make sure that we can actually mix to all the speakers in the dolby atmos setup and for that we need to add an output bus and we'll take the maximum dolby atmos configuration that cubase supports and that's 7.1.4 let's call this atmos bus now it's trying to connect all the 12 speaker channels from this dolby atmos setup to outputs of my interface that are not used at this moment and as you can see i don't even have enough fortunately i don't need that many because we're going to listen in a different way so i'm just going to say don't connect this bus to any outputs but i am going to say that this is my main mix so that it gets routed to the outputs and speakers that i have configured in control room so i now have an additional output bus now in addition on this bus i'm going to put the dolby atmos renderer plugin and there's two important sections in this plugin one is a section with audio objects you can see those as the input channels the input audio tracks for my dolby atmos mix so there can be 128 inputs they're called objects in atmos terms and the other thing that you're seeing over here is that you have a down mix option and this is what allows us to listen to a dolby atmos mix on much smaller speaker configurations because this down mix option sounds as if it has to do with actually creating the export of this mix but that's not true this is where you configure the renderer for your speaker setup and that's actually very different from how we produced music for a stereo setup our output would be a stereo file and that exact stereo file would then be suitable to play back on the system with two speakers but in dolby atmos this works in a different way the export of the dolby atmos mix contains the audio for all the various dolby atmos objects and it also contains the metadata for how these objects are panned in the immersive sound field and only at playback all this information is rendered for your speaker setup and this can be a very simple traditional stereo speaker setup so then all this information is folded back into two channels going to your stereo speakers but it can also be sent to your 7.1.4 speaker setup and in that case all the information from the dolby atmos export is rendered specifically for your 7.1.4 setup and anything in between or even anything more elaborate let's go back to this dialog now because what i want to do i want to be able to listen to my dolby atmos mix on two channels on my outputs so i could select 2.0 but obviously a lot of the dolby atmos effects would be lost on me then i would have no immersive sound experience at all but a very useful way of listening to a dolby atmos mix is actually via this binaural setup and binaural is meant for headphone listening because if you listen to a normal stereo mix on headphones i know we've probably all gotten used to it now but it actually sounds very unnatural because the sound seems to come from inside your head and if you pan the sound completely to the right you'll just hear it in your right ear which is not at all the same as when you listen to speakers because if you listen to a sound that is coming from just the right speaker you still hear in your left ear as well and your brain hears it outside of your head to your right and that's not what you hear when you have a regular stereo mix on headphones however the binaural system actually simulates this more realistic listening environment on your headphones so by setting the renderer to binaural you can still listen to adobe atmos mix in your headphones and you can listen to a lot of the spatial and immersive qualities of that mix even though you don't have an elaborate speaker setup now next step if we go back to this renderer dialog you saw that we have room for 120 audio objects and those can be single tracks but they can also be group tracks or even virtual instruments that are playing but one particular setup that's usually part of these audio objects is the so called bet and the bet you can sort of see as the ambient sound in your mix and in the movie this could for example be the music and the objects could be the special effects which you hear flying around your head or panning to the right or left or maybe even the dialogue moving along with the actors on the screen now in music it's not so clear what's the bet and what are objects technically the bed is a more conventional stem oriented part of a dolby atmos mix so this could be a stereo pair but in this case let's make the bed the maximum size that is allowed to be which is 7.1.2 so we're going to create a 7.1.2 bet for dolby atmos which are 10 audio channels so they will actually take up 10 of these objects in my renderer let me show you so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a group channel but i also want to route all my audio tracks at this moment to this group channel so i'm selecting all my audio tracks i'm saying add group channel to selected channels i'm choosing a 7.1.2 configuration for this bed and i'm calling it atmos bed and you see that it's being routed to the atmos bus initially so if we now look at the mixer you can see that all the panels of my audio channels have changed and let me actually hide that stereo in channel that's not useful because they're now being routed to a 7.1.2 channel so the channel panner is set to vst multi-banner and that's exactly what we need to make dolby atmos mix now there's one thing left to do to get an initial dolby atmos setup and that's to tell cubase which renderer we use and what bet we use we can now select that we're using the renderer for dolby atmos that's the plugin that we inserted on the atmos bus and we can add a bet to our dolby atmos setup and a source track we can choose the atmos bet group channel we can say that it's music and over here i can also just select that i want to apply the source track name to name the bed so if i now play audio you can see that all audio is routed to our atmos bus and nothing is routed to my regular stereo out anymore and that routing is actually done in a very special way because it's being done by sent to the atmos bus renderer plugin if you look at the renderer plugin you see that sidechaining is enabled and you see that over here there are 128 sidechain channels basically that can be used to send 128 object audio channels to the renderer and you can see that object sidechain 1 is being used by atmos bet and that's also really the audio that you're hearing because if i lower the level of descent you will notice that the audio gets cut out completely so there's no more regular routing it all goes via descent at the same time in this renderer plugin you can now see that the first 10 atmos objects are occupied by this 7.1.2 bed group channel and we can start mixing those channels in the immersive surround field by using the panner now at this point it's a good idea to put on your headphones so that you can experience what i do in a binaural way so that you can actually hear the immersive character of the changes in the mix that i'm making okay now that we've set up all the routing and the technicalities let's try to make use of this immersive sound stage that we now have and change some of the panning on these tracks and see how that sounds with the binaural renderer and remember you need to use headphones or earbuds to properly hear this so let's leave the renderer open so that we can see what's happening on the various audio objects that we have as part of the bat channel here basically they are routed to the various speakers of a 7.1.2 surround setup and let's start by soloing the beat and opening the banner now this is the vst multi-panering cubase you see there are lots of controls and if you click on this arrow here it shows an extended display so that you can get a better view of what's happening in the space the left picture is a top view so since this is stereo track you see that the left side of this track is coming from the left speaker right side of this track is coming from the right speaker and basically the sound is all projected on the back wall [Music] in the renderer you can see that only two channels i used the left and right channel as for a stereo track now in a dolby atmos mix i might want to widen the beat so the drums by bringing them a bit forward and thus making them more at the same level as my head so that the sides are more wide [Music] yeah you can see i can bring it all the way to the back but i think by putting it over here the sound of the beat is more wide you can also see over here in the audio objects for the bet that the audio of the beat gets routed to more of these objects so for example it's also sent to the side speakers which you can see more clearly if i enable 7.1.4 here there you can see the audio being sent to left right channel some to the center channel and some to the surround left right speakers now let's change it back to binaural so you can hear it more clearly in the same way we can also change the panning on the bass track bring it forward a bit like the drums and maybe send some of it to the lfe channel now for the piano arpeggio let's actually put that behind us and bring it up so that it seems to come from the height speakers a bit as well [Music] again you see the audio being sent to different objects and thus channels of the bed due to the panning let's shortly listen to the combination of that yeah so hard to compare to the stereo now right away but it does give a more spatial character to the mix already and maybe those percussive sounds in the beginning i also want to put them like super wide from the to the left and right of me as for the guitar i want to turn it into a real dolby atmos object which you can basically pan all around during the music which gives you a lot more flexibility to where you place it and how you perceive the guitar sound so for that i need to go back to the adm authoring for dolby atmos and i can say that i want to create an object from the selected track now let's say this is also music and if you now look at the sense you can see again that the guitar has been sent to object sidechain 2 of the renderer if we go to renderer here and look at the side chains object sidechain 2 you can see that the guitar has been sent to the renderer via this sidechain so this is the way that the renderer gets the audio of all these object tracks separately so it can use it to properly generate the final export as well as apply the processing for down mixing it to whatever option you have selected here so if we now solo the guitar we see that the paner is now in object mode which gives it a couple of different options over here but if i play the guitar you can see that i can move it all around the immersive audio space [Music] even to where it's above me so let's listen to the total mix now yes you can see all the activity on the bad channels as well as on this separate guitar objects and for all the objects you can also see them over here in the object view of the renderer now finally after you finish your mix in dolby atmos you still need to export an adm file which is the audio definition model and you can find that again in the adm authoring panel if you push export adm file and we create an export directory you can for example export mix1.wav file and this is now a special wave file which contains all of the audio for the atmos objects as well as any object automation and this file can then be used to send to streaming services for distributing adobe atmos mix so i hope you found this a nice overview to get started with dolby atmos in cubase 12. now will this take over stereo mixing well i think definitely not in the short term and you might even think that this could go the same way as surround mixing for music which is really a bit of a niche however for this technology it might be different because of the binaural rendering that can be done this means that anybody with just two earbuds connected to the phone via wire or bluetooth can experience a dolby atmos mix so in this case the consumers already have the equipment that's necessary to enjoy dolby atmos and apple and apple music actively promote spatial audio for use on iphones for example and spatial audio can render dolby atmos mixes as well to an immersive sound field on your airpods or whatever you're listening through anyway i think it's a very nice technology to dive into learn more about and yeah only the future will tell how popular it will be and whether it can really take off now in this video even though it has been a longer video on my channel i've really only scratched the surface so i've also included some links to deeper dives there's one video by the channel called music tech explained which really dives deeper into dolby atmos and what it is and what the various formats are and how the technology supports this new way of mixing then there are two more videos about using dolby atmos in cubase 12 from the channel of michael g wagner here even longer and go into more depth on how this is done in cubase and it's always good to have a look at somebody else's video on the same subject to get a better understanding of these matters by looking at the same thing from different angles and finally i've included a link to a video from adam audio in which the mixing engineer goes from stereo mix to adobe atmos mix so the actual practice of how do you actually make a mix that sounds good in dolby atmos now up next i've linked the video to a totally different subject which is about the cubase 12 improvements for tempo and time editing have a look at that enjoy the video and see you soon [Music] you

Channel: Lanewood Studios

Views: 10,486

Keywords: Music Production, Home Studio, Music Producer, how to, music production software, music production for beginners, mixing studio, home recording, recording studio, Cubase, lanewood studios, daw, awash, awashmusic, cubase pro, cubase artist, cubase tips, youtube tutorials, cubase 12, dolby atmos, cubase dolby atmos, mixing dolby atmos, dolby atmos mixing cubase

Id: wS2RAAgvfBk

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022