Getting Started with Atmos Mixing

[Applause] [Music] hi i'm mitch gallagher from sweetwater i am joined by sales engineer sarah lambert it's great to have you here hi thanks for having me absolutely we're going to talk about how to get started mixing in atmos now atmos of course most of us think of a huge speaker array and subwoofers and all kinds of hardware and things we need to have but you can actually get started working with atmos basically with just a daw your laptop and the renderer software which we're going to talk about in just a second so that's really all you need to kind of get started yeah it is i mean um you a big surround sound setup is what's recommended but you could just use right now we have pro tools and we have the dolby atmos renderer on your computer and just a pair of headphones and you can actually create a mix that way you can start working in the binaural version of atmos anyway yes absolutely right now is pro tools the only way we can do this on a laptop no so there are other daws that work with the renderer and then there are some that actually have the renderer built in uh there's logic nuendo and i think cubase also and davinci resolve if you're doing video right and then pro tools and live uh are supported and then other daws there are varying degrees of support they aren't officially supported yet right there are some that communicate to the renderer uh just fine you may actually need the separate renderer but it works right now speaking of the renderer there's two packages that are available from dolby there's the production suite and there is the mastering suite what's the difference between those so the mastering suite allows you to pull up the renderer on a separate computer and that has a lot of benefits one of uh which is saving your cpu it takes a lot of power you know it's taxing on your computer to have both the renderer and your session running at the same time so that gives you a benefit you could also run a lot more dsp plugins should you have the render on a separate computer um the productions the production suite uh you can run just on the same computer but it still gives you the ability to render that metadata and create those deliverables just fine right and we've got the i've got an m1 max here and uh with a fair amount of ram in it and we've had no trouble running both of them in the same computer works just fine so if you want to get started you don't have to have a second computer this is the way to do that now the production suite you can download a 90-day free trial from dolby.com to get started with it and then you can also purchase that from avid.com correct yes uh pro tools right now actually if you are subscribed to it you can buy it for an extra 99. it's normally 300 a production suite but if you get pro tools you can get it for today for 99. yeah and like i said for three months you can try it out for free on your computer anyway and see if it's something you want to explore i've been having fun with it i mean it's yeah why wouldn't you yeah we've been looking at it just for um you know not not too long but um already it's it's exciting it's something that's really fun to get into so yeah glad to sort of show you so let's uh there are some things we have to do to set up the renderer as well as some things we have to do in pro tools to get the two talking to each other let's kind of go step by step through what we need to do yeah so let's let's go through this so that we know how to set it up properly so people feel confident jumping into this so we have the renderer open right now we're going to start here when you go into preferences you want to make sure right now we're set to core audio through mitch's computer and we have the input devices dolby atmos bridge that is going to be the way that we connect to pro tools and have these two software working with each other we have the output device right now just set to his macbook pro speakers our ltc channel set to channel 129 that's by default you can check off headphone mode only if you're going to be uh you know working with headphones which we are right now and if you go into headphone over here we want to make sure that this is on binaural it is all ready and that's good that means we're going to be actually listening to our atmos mix and not just a stereo mix press accept so that's pretty much it and the the renderer what that does is take all the outputs from pro tools for all these different surround channels and all the immersive channels and things that sort of brings them together in a way that you can listen to them and also ultimately create deliverables that you'll send to someone else or listen to in other ways yeah so why the renderer is necessary is atmos involves a lot of metadata that needs to be read alongside the audio to know how to place it to know how to filter it and so the render is what incorporates that to your audio in sync with the ltc track and that's how you're able to create that audio and create the deliverables that you need so this is a necessary necessary part of it right for now we're just monitoring through it which is fine we can just listen to what it's doing and and we're all good but we do need to launch pro tools let's go ahead and get that going here and once that launches then there will be a few settings we need to make there now can we use any audio like i've just got a folder here with uh some tracks from a song i'm working on can we just use that audio in there or does it have to be a certain format yeah no you absolutely can just drag in wav files i recommend when you start with this using the pro tools template that they have prepared for dolby atmos it'll show you all the routing of your objects and then you can just drag in what you would like to be an object a wav file from perhaps the previous session and then you can focus on the atmos aspect of your mix the panning and that sort of thing okay now you mentioned two things there that i want to clarify one is bed tracks and one is objects what are those and what's the difference between them okay so you have 10 channels that is your bed so that is going to be like traditional surround sound it's going to be audio that is sent to your speakers and it stays where it's at or it has normal traditional panning the objects and what's different about them is that they are not tethered to a specific speaker you can pan them around like crazy if you want to in elevation you know left and right behind your head and it will maintain that mix that format whether you are working on a 7.1.4 system 5.1.4 or just in headphones it'll sort of down mix and collapse and still keep that that same aspect so working at binaural then we are still going to get the effect correct yeah you're going to experience the the panning it isn't quite the same as if you hear everything on a lot of speakers but it is it's very cool and you can actually have a mix translate well nice okay so we've got pro tools opened up here and you mentioned we want to create from a template template so let's go ahead and just select that there and we need to get into our dolby atmos selections here and what do we want to choose so let's choose the we want the renderer dolby atmos bridge stereo and for our i o settings we can choose the matching audio bridge stereo we want to leave it at 24 bit and 48k here with the file type is bwf so that is all we need to do and we can name this whatever we want dolby there's one other step that we need to make here and we actually learned this the hard way didn't we but you have to basically allow the renderer to access the max built-in microphone not sure why but it's something that seems to be required for this to uh to work to get the render to be able to have levels and see audio from uh from your from your pro tools session right so that's in your system settings for your mac in the privacy uh settings and you just enable it for the the dolby renderer and it works voila okay so our session has opened up and this looks a little bit different than a traditional pro tools session we've got some extra columns and things tell us what's going on here yes so we have an extra column that says object this is a great way to see all of your objects what is an object how it is routed and so when i press this button here you'll notice it can actually toggle in between being a bed and being an object and you can actually automate this if you want to okay and above that there's actually a 7.1.4 bed track right this next track up here yes so you'll notice that this session has a bunch of objects and you can delete the ones that you're not using these are all stereo they have two channels on them and then there's this 7.1.2 bed so this and it says right on here is uh where you want to send your audio that you want to send to the bed so the things that you don't want to be objects that are independently moving around okay so for now let's just drag a stereo track in and get some audio working and just get it routed make sure we got everything happening properly let's start with that okay so mitch has a file here of some wav files so let's drag guitar left and right into into here session we'll zoom it a little bit so we can see where that's at and uh let's go ahead and create a loop so that that'll play back so we'll just select here so we've got audio in there but actually we still need to make some settings in pro tools for this to work correct right so you want to double check a few uh settings in pro tools you're going to want to go into setup wind uh the setup and you want to see that this is the dolby atmos bridge remember is how it's going to speak to the renderer and then in peripherals we want to check over here at dolby atmos that we have a connection here right now it is black right now we want it green it is connecting and there is our computer so when that's solid green we should be ready to go so we've got our settings made in the renderer we've got our settings made in pro tools now when we hit play we should hear audio that's right do the honors there we go now at this point that's just a stereo pair feeding into the renderer right it's not really going it's not really doing anything correct and as far as atmos is concerned so how do we get to where we can pan things around and take advantage of all that atmos offers us so one thing that is now native to pro tools which is very neat is a new plug-in so this plug-in you can insert right on your audio track let's search for dolby and it is the uh the stereo panner plug-in alrighty so we got this pulled up we have this on localhost because we're just using this one computer and the objects we have in this first column are objects 11 and 12. so those are going to be your first objects we want them working together so we can change this this button to gray if it's green it means it's functioning as a single object so we needed to take that off in order to route this here so we do actually need to make sure that our plug-in is routed to the appropriate objects on the track and make sure all of these match so at this point then the audio is playing in pro tools passing through the panner just as it would any other plugin right but this panner then allows us to route to these objects that are going to send into the renderer and you can apply different panning things here yes let's let's get into the things because the things are lots of fun so right now it has automatically set up to mirror x and that means on the x-axis whatever i do to this object you can drag and move around the other object and you can actually you know record this in so that during your song you can have it move around however you like you can even put it on x y and have them move around in this manner or you can press copy in which case they're both going to be doing the same thing and they're both going to be moving in the same direction at the same time okay and so let's go back to uh the xy one there which is probably where you're often going to be using that or one of those anyway uh so we can automate this do you do this in real time there are other controls as well right yeah so you could drag it around if you wanted to but there's actually a sequencer down here and it's a pretty cool feature if you turn this on let's say we want to edit the first step we could draw a squiggly line here if we wanted our object to for some reason move like this and then come back to the start so when i press done what we'll see when we press play is our object moving around like i have it now right now it's moving around very fast it actually moves around uh per the bpm of the song and here's where you can change that so if we want it to move slower uh we can choose there you go wow that is cool yeah it's lots of fun and then you can have different steps when i'm assuming different patterns than that you could switch among different panning patterns yeah the sky's the limit with this and speaking of sky that's a bad pun but here's some elevation tools that you may have where if you move the object over head you will actually see that it um the bubble sort of gets bigger and that shows you that it's closer to the ceiling above the head closer to you and when you move it down towards the sides that's when you will be able to see it get smaller in reference to the room ah i see so they each kind of take different tracks with those so that allows you to get the height elevation yeah it's an easy way to manage height because you're working on an xyz access so there's a lot to to do but this plug-in is it makes it as simple as you can right so we'd continue loading up tracks we could have our 7.1.2 bed tracks as many well almost as many objects as you possibly want you know if you have that many tracks or whatever uh and just create your mix and that's it right yeah that's it the last thing is the ltc generator and pro tools did this automatically so when we loaded up the template we already had one of these but if you wanted to create this it's something that you need to have your session sync to the renderer so that when you are recording your master file uh in the end you want to make sure that the metadata is lined up exactly with your audio so that's what this is for so that's time code basically that pro tools is sending into the renderer and the renderer just follows that yeah ltc tc for time code and so this is just all it is is an aux channel uh an aux and we have this plug in there uh-huh which showed up automatically again in this template and that's but you could put that in as well and where you see that is if we play back here and we switch to the renderer we can see the time code here yes following along with it we also have meters where basically you can see from the indicators level we have meters there you can see positioning in the room so you get a good readout of what's happening get a good readout what's happening in the renderer as well yeah yeah they're both very useful tools yeah simple yeah you just have to make some settings you have to make sure the settings are right and once you have that done then you're just mixing like you'd create any mix just incorporating all those extra dimensions that you can work at yeah it's it's a big step and it's a lot more it's a lot more to mixing it's a lot more to audio but i think it's very exciting for people that want to get their work out there and have it in a whole new format you can absolutely do it right sarah thanks so much for taking the time to come down and show us this i mean man it's a lot of fun just just play with it don't yeah you just makes you want to dig in when you see all those uh all those effects you can do but yeah of course thanks so much absolutely so if you want to experience what it's like to mix with atmos you want to start with headphones do a binaural mix this is a great way to do it check out the production suite it's available at avid.com if you're a pro tools user you can get it for 99 otherwise 299 i think is what the price is and it all runs in one computer make a few settings and you're mixing an atmos thanks for joining us today i'm mitch gallagher from sweetwater

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 77,522

Keywords: Sweetwater, Dolby, Atmost, Recording, Studio, Pro Audio, Music Instruments, hide-from-insync

Id: GREyB2DMYvg

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022