# 2.0 vs. Quad vs 5.1



## mscp (May 3, 2020)

How many of you still compose in stereo (2.0) for TV/Film?


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## gsilbers (May 5, 2020)

i think its still mostly stereo except for a few top end composers. maybe ? 

there is also a change towards 7.1 and atmos so that throws a little wrench into surround deliveries.


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## mscp (May 6, 2020)

I thought I was the oddball here. Glad to know I'm not.


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## gsilbers (May 6, 2020)

Well, I could be wrong. I’d like to know more how composers are delivering with the whole Dolby atmos thing.
@charlieclouser has some interesting posts about logic and surround. 
but I’m seeing more mixers doing atmos and atmos stages and never thought about how composer deal with this.
Or even if it’s 5.1 then the stage delivers in 7.1?
I do know a lot mixers prefer stereo so they can up mix themselves with better plugins or reverbs but not at AAA blockbusters.


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## dgburns (May 6, 2020)

Real Orchestra, yes to 7.1. But it gets nuts when you start adding all the overdubs. I don’t work with real orch, so I don’t play there.

Daw based hybrid score, Quad is still a good way to go, especially to TV. Film might need the center channel, but it would then be 5.0, not 5.1. The LFE is basically useless so best avoided unless you’re Alan Meyerson and sit in on the final mix.

The Dolby atmos thing brought some head scratching into the equation- what role does music have in all this? Well, one thing that came out of panning stuff more discreetly resulted in the elements sounding more exposed and less coherent. It looks like 5.0 still has some favour. And remember that not everything in Atmos gets panned all over the place. Dunno, maybe at some point it might get more involved, but for now 5.0 would be as high as I would go.

Mixing in quad/5.0 - tons of new sonic possibilities open up that you just can’t do in vanilla stereo. But IMHO, it is an art form in and of itself. Even pulling off a regular band type cue, if you define the room the drums are in, you open up how you can pan the whole band.

At the end of the day, we look forward to a screen, and that means that while some sound designy stuff can get crazy movement, it always has to be considered with that screen being in front of you.

Once you get used to quad/5.0 you don’t want to go back. But you do need to make sure your mixes fold down to stereo ok. That’s for another thread.

Synth pads in surround = glorious


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## Scoremixer (May 6, 2020)

gsilbers said:


> Well, I could be wrong. I’d like to know more how composers are delivering with the whole Dolby atmos thing.



They're not - it's a music/dubbing mixer thing. 

Surround formats (particularly Atmos) really come alive for music when there's real content to be captured in a suitably large space, ie recording orchestra or other large scale overdubs. Typically for an Atmos production this means capturing enough room mics to populate the basic 7.0 bed channels, and maybe 4 extra ambient mics that can be supplied as a separate stem to the dub for the height channels. There's not much discrete panning of individual elements to single speakers, because as dgburns says, it quickly becomes distracting and unmusical.


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## gsilbers (May 6, 2020)

Scoremixer said:


> They're not - it's a music/dubbing mixer thing.
> 
> Surround formats (particularly Atmos) really come alive for music when there's real content to be captured in a suitably large space, ie recording orchestra or other large scale overdubs. Typically for an Atmos production this means capturing enough room mics to populate the basic 7.0 bed channels, and maybe 4 extra ambient mics that can be supplied as a separate stem to the dub for the height channels. There's not much discrete panning of individual elements to single speakers, because as dgburns says, it quickly becomes distracting and unmusical.



good info. For the record my question is how composers are delivering to the sound stage for the re recording mixer use them for Dolby atmos mixing. Specially if a music mix is surround, how would it affect the mixer and it’s atmos work. Ie- more trouble than stereO. And what about stems.

so, not implying that composer deliver in atmos.


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## method1 (May 6, 2020)

What are the expectations for delivery of score to Netflix, HBO etc? Do they expect stereo or 5.1 from composers?


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## Scoremixer (May 6, 2020)

gsilbers said:


> good info. For the record my question is how composers are delivering to the sound stage for the re recording mixer use them for Dolby atmos mixing. Specially if a music mix is surround, how would it affect the mixer and it’s atmos work. Ie- more trouble than stereO. And what about stems.
> 
> so, not implying that composer deliver in atmos.



Well, it is more trouble than stereo, but once you wrap your head around the extra resources and template-building at the start of the project it's not a big deal. 

It's neither practical nor advisable to try and deliver every element as Atmos, so typically on a big picture you might (for example) deliver 3 orchestral stems in 7.1 format, then on top of that an additional stereo or quad track per stem comprising extra ambient mics for the dubbing guys to use in the ceiling or discard as they see fit. Take a considered view on other elements, eg if you recorded a choir in the same room as the orch that might be nice to deliver the extra height stem, but a big percussion ensemble might get a bit splashy so that gets 7.1 or less. Things that started out life as stereo sounds, ie your synths and samples often just get printed as 5.1 stems, with the surround channels bled into the sides and rears of the 7.1 bed at the dub. If things get super crazy with stemming, eg your director/music editor wants literal control over everything and 20+ stems then certain sounds might just get delivered in stereo and spread around a bit at the dub. 

There's a free John Powell talk at MWTM that breaks down a cue of his, and he briefly talks through what they delivered for the dub and why.


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## Scoremixer (May 6, 2020)

method1 said:


> What are the expectations for delivery of score to Netflix, HBO etc? Do they expect stereo or 5.1 from composers?



Netflix are pushing composers to deliver for their originals in 5.1 these days, and for their dubs to do Atmos.


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## Rob Elliott (May 6, 2020)

I get the occasional 'surround' request but 95%+ of the time the dub mixer wants stereo (but with stems of course) to give themselves total control over what goes where ( I throw a sub bass or timp at one speaker or the other and you just know that is where their sfx (worked on for days...is going) - who do you think is going to win that battle over placement....existence in final mix?


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## gsilbers (May 6, 2020)

Rob Elliott said:


> I get the occasional 'surround' request but 95%+ of the time the dub mixer wants stereo (but with stems of course) to give themselves total control over what goes where ( I throw a sub bass or timp at one speaker or the other and you just know that is where their sfx (worked on for days...is going) - who do you think is going to win that battle over placement....existence in final mix?



yes i think this is the most common as well in my experience. mainly for tv shows and most movies. 
keeping in mind AAA blockbusters who have remote control catz delivering their stems in surround accounts for very little of the total movies a year. 

and on the other side of this stuff... 95-98% of poeple will listen to it in stereo no matter what movie or tv show it is. belive me... i counted


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## JohnG (May 6, 2020)

Scoremixer said:


> They're not - it's a music/dubbing mixer thing.



This ^^ for most 'umble composers, or when you're replacing much/all of the samples with live players. At RCP no doubt people are writing in 5.1 or 7.1 or something, but not chez moi.

I'm sure @charlieclouser will have something to say.

One proviso -- definitely get a sub so it's 2.1 at least.


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## charlieclouser (May 6, 2020)

I did start using 5.1 right from the start on my first movie in 2003, and I've delivered a couple dozen in that format with anywhere from 3 to 8 stems - but on tv I've always delivered stereo stems only. Thoughts about 5.1 that from my experience:

- Since my scores are very sound-design-y and not ever attempting to be realistic captures of a concert hall or symphony orchestra, I can take liberties and be more cavalier about how I spray elements around the room.

- Due to limitations with how Logic has implemented surround, I cannot do true LCR panning, use true-surround plugins, or even use the joystick-style surround panners that Logic has. This is because at the moment Logic only lets you configure a single set of surround outputs to which the joystick panners will route audio - so if you need to print multiple stems in surround to hardware outputs that go to a separate "print rig" machine, instead of using "export as stems" or something, then you can only configure sets of outputs as stereo or mono. This means you wind up with each surround stem's sub-master being comprised of two stereo and two mono Aux objects. This is sort of like doing surround on a stereo-only analog console like an SSL 4k, where you route signals directly to a stem's Front L+R pair, and use sends from the individual channels to get signals into that stem's Rear Ls+Rs, Center, and LFE. This is clumsy and not ideal, and really barely qualifies as being called surround. 

- Because of those limitations, most of my stems are actually in 4.0, sometimes 4.1, and rarely (if ever) actually 5.1.

- I send all main stereo signals to the Front L+R pair, and what is in the Rear Ls+Rs pair is usually just reverbs and delays, and only on a subset of the tracks, so that within each stem some elements are front-centric and some will also splash to the rear speakers.

- If I do want some elements within a stem to hit the LFE or Center channels then I must use a send from that element's track channel to get there. This works, and I can use post-fader sends to that the send level tracks the main channel fader's levels and any automation, but it's clumsy and there's no way to smoothly pan an element across the LCR field. Still, that's how I do it.

- For some elements I essentially "quad-track" them, like when you double-track rhythm guitars and hard pan them left and right. I'll record four takes of something and route each one dry to the L, R, Ls, and Rs channels on that stem. This gives a claustrophobic, enveloping, and pretty cool effect. Works great on sounds with a mono origin, like a Minimoog synth sweep, where you just record it four times and spread it around. Sounds huge.

- I've been talking to (more like begging) the Logic team in an attempt to get more comprehensive surround routing capabilities in Logic, and I hold out hope that the situation will improve. The implementation that they suggested was a "tabbed" UI in the Preferences > Audio dialog that would let you select tabs A-Z (instead of just one as it is now) and configure a set of up to eight hardware outputs on each of those tabs. Then, when assigning the output for each track you could select "Surround A" through "Surround Z" instead of just "Surround" as it is now. This would basically give you 26 surround stems instead of just a single surround mix bus. The good news is that this would be extremely simple from a use standpoint, without some confusing new UI element like the dreaded "checkerboard" routing grid as in ProTools, and would thus be very Apple-like and would stand a greater chance of passing Apple's "simplicity filter", and also I was told that all audio pathways within Logic's engine are already "N" channels wide, so the engine doesn't need to be re-written from scratch or even modified in any way - it's just a UI puzzle. All Track / Instrument / Aux / Send / Insert pathways can already deal with wide channel counts. So... fingers crossed.

- Because of the clumsy way I'm forced to get signal into the Center channel, I basically never use it, although it's there in my template. Before I start printing cues I have a long talk with the re-recording mixers on the dub stage and say something like, "Is it okay with you if I leave all my Center channels empty?" and they always reply, "Actually that's great for us. That means dialog and fx can own the Center channel, so we have more headroom there and won't wreck your mix if we need room in the Center, and if we feel like there's a hole in the music in the Center or a lack of "phantom center" we can just send a little bit of your L+R to the Center to fill it in. I won't tell anyone if you don't!" So I'm basically in 4.1 almost all of the time. I think JunkieXL sometimes does it this way also, even though Cubase doesn't suffer from the same limitations that Logic does.

- I make sure that the music will still sound okay even if the Rear Ls+Rs channels are not even used at all. I think of those as "bonus" channels - it sounds more awesome if they're set at unity gain with the front pair, but if they go away the music doesn't fall apart or sound thin or small. I do this not just to accommodate stereo-only release formats and playback systems like ordinary tv speakers, but also because once the sfx get heavy the mixers may need dip or mute my rear channels - or maybe they don't use them at all except for in a couple spots. No problem.

- Since I can't do true-surround reverbs, I basically use two stereo reverbs, a front and a rear. I use similar algorithms or IRs for each but with slightly different decay times and filter settings. Usually the rear pair is set to be a bit longer than the front, and substantially brighter or darker to create different effects. I don't use a longer pre-delay in the rear usually though.

- Likewise for delays, I use two stereo delays, usually set to some sort of ping-pong algorithm but with the rear pair set to 2x the delay times and with the L+R reversed, which if you get it right will create a 1-2-3-4 ping-pong that seems to travel around the room. I usually fiddle with this on a per-cue basis to insure that any rhythmic delay effects don't clash with the rhythmic feel of the piece, but for ambient cues I have a default setting in my template that gives a luxurious spatial effect as ambient sounds bounce around the room traveling from front to rear.

- Since I can't use true-surround compressors / limiters / eq, I just duplicate the plugins that are on the front L+R sub masters to the Rear Ls+Rs sub masters and hope for the best. This works just fine but means that the detectors in any dynamics plugins are NOT linked across all channels within a surround array. In practice it's not a problem, but it's technically "not right" and if I were dealing with legitimate surround recordings of an orchestra in the room or whatever, this ain't how you're supposed to do it - I realize that. But for hybrid electronic scores with my "fake surround" it works. I use something like Waves L3-LL MultiMaximizer as a limiter on every stem sub master, and I just copy+paste the settings from the instance that's on the front L+R to the rear Ls+Rs.

- My current template only has 7x stems plus a composite mix, which works out to 7 x 6 = 48 channels per print pass. I send out of a MADI interface on the Logic rig to a MADI interface on a separate ProTools computer, so I could raise the channel count of my print pass to 64 (the limit of a single MADI cable at 48khz). This would give me as many as 9x stems plus a composite mix (with four extra channels left over), so it's not a huge improvement, but I'll probably make that change soon. 

- If, however, I switched to just printing stereo stems, I could go absolutely nuts with how many stems I can print - 32 stereo stems on a single $7 MADI cable! - and I'd have a MUCH easier time with routing, stem sub masters, effects, bouncing internally in Logic, using "Export As Stems", etc. And the drawback of not being able to have just a few elements within a stem going to the rears (or rear fx) would probably be offset by the additional separation of elements across a higher stem count - but of course that means I'm relying on the dubbing mixers to spread things out across the surround arrays, and they may have bigger fires to put out and just push up the faders and not bother to take the time. So I always figure that if I do it myself and they are in a hurry, the end result is at least some element of surround spread. There are also a few workflow drawbacks to going to a higher stem count though, so I'm not 100% on whether I'll make that switch.

- When I did my first feature in 2003 I had just bought the Dynaudio AIR speaker system which has digital inputs, full surround capability, and Cat5 networking between the speakers, and that score was going to be pretty sound-design-y and I wanted to make the most of the technology to create scary and claustrophobic atmospheres in the score, so.... I went for it, even though Logic had severe limitations. Those limitations haven't really changed much, other than Logic going from 64 busses to 256 (or is it 1,000 now?), but when it only had 64 busses that meant that I was limited in how many stems I could lay out since I use lots of busses for routing to the stem sub master Aux objects and for combining the stems into a composite mix. So now things are a bit better but still not ideal. 

Cubase and ProTools people have it much easier.


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## JohnG (May 6, 2020)

A pity Charlie had nothing to contribute...


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