In addition to Musicvid's response, if you aren't truly making a 5.1 mix, there is a free VST plugin that will simulate a 5.1 mix from your existing stereo audio. It really does enhance it.

Dave T2

Do you recall the plugin name, Dave?
Does it work on the Vegas master mixer?

Musicvid

http://stevethomson.ca/vi/


It works very well as a simulator. I used it on a song that was running in a museum theater and it filled the room nicely.

Dave T2

If you put the same mono sound into 5 tracks and try to make it surround you will be dealing with disaster. There will be phase cancellation and it will be different in every place it is played because the speakers are in different locations.

However if you do that and chop it up (edit) sure you can make someone coming from behind sound like that are doing that. Those kinds of things won't hurt..

Actually, I don't think there's much you can do with a mono source at all to make it 'surround'.

No need to make copies to other tracks - with the 5.1 panner (if you are in 5.1 mode) you can just set the pan for the middle of the room..... but you may find you achieve better intelligibility for dialogue in many venues if you use just one speaker (Centre).

The mentioned "VI Stereo to 5.1 Surround Converter" VST plugin really doesn't work effectively with a mono source either - you just get mono out, because it is designed to work with a stereo source, whereupon it uses subtraction, addition, some delays and a cross-over to "extract" a 5.1 simulation - the 'wider' the stereo source the better the result.

Thanks to all for your inputs. How are you guys produce a 5.1 audio with let say a Zoom H1 or H4n sound recorder?. I am thinking of getting a zoom H1 but that is a stereo audio recoder. So, my question is, if I want to start with a 5.1 audio source, BUT how?

Zoom h2 has four simultaneous front/rear audio capsules.
What more could you want?

Actually, I don't think there's much you can do with a mono source at all to make it 'surround'.

Sure there is: pan it around to different speakers. :)

To get 5 channels (let's skip the sub) recorded you need to record your 5 channels on something. IE three stereo devices and ditch one channel, five mono devices, etc. Or, you may want to record in mono/stereo and manually pan with the 5.1 mixer.

In the real world, all that's needed is stereo front and stereo rear. A dedicated center mono is nice when available, but can be downmixed (and often is).

Personally, all of my shows are recorded orchestra (stereo mix to the sides), vocals (center with some intentional bleed to the sides), and rear (actual stereo, some bleed to front). As many as 48 mics are used to create these fundamental mixes.

I am no surround expert. I actually avoided it like the plague because it's not easy and besides not many local muscians wanted it, they just wanted a CD in their hands.

But having said that if you want to do it then it cost money to do it right. First you have to have a surround mixing room. Then you need a quality mixing software, Vegas is no place to do it. I use Cakewalk Sonar. Inside of that you need quality converters and word clocking (I use a Lynx Aurora).

After that to capture you need a portable multi track and a bunch of mics. Just like musicvid said he is using 48 and I bet they are going to high end preamps and tracking. That's 48 mono channels he is using to mix to surround.

Then after you have all that stuff you need to know how to sound check everything for phase cancellations.

Now the intent of surround is not to have a persons voice to come out of 5 speakers. Typically the center is voice and the other 4 are to convey the surroundings of what is being watched. If its music then you are trying to convey something like the fact that the bass player is on the left, drums further back etc.

Mixed badly and all you will do is make your audience sick because their mind is seeing something happen but at the same time the mind realizes the sound is in the wrong place and the subconcious goes nuts.

Again Thank you to all. Produce a 5.1 is much more complicated than I thought. I'll leave it at that.

Now the intent of surround is not to have a persons voice to come out of 5 speakers. Typically the center is voice and the other 4 are to convey the surroundings of what is being watched.

Stuff like that seems to be the standard (vocals = center, SFX front left/right, some in the rear's & music in the rear) and I hate that. HATE it. It's annoying and a waste of time.

Making something sound good in surround doesn't NEED to be hard, we're just all video people here and stereo is "good enough" for 99.9% of everyone out there.

With Vegas 4 I mixed some of my own 5.1 DVD's and they turned out very good. I converted a VHS to DVD and did a 5.1 mix for it: I used the existing audio and panned it would where it would be expected from, the SFX is what had the most work done in it. I didn't want a "typical" 5.1 DVD/theater production with the voices in the center, etc. I wanted it real 5.1 (The Lord of the Rings did a great 5.1 mix).

I didn't need a great system to edit with (I used a 5.1 system off the shelf @ Radio Shack that had 6 separate RCA inputs for the 5.1). It wasn't Hollywood quality but I'm not them and nobody who saw had any issues with it.

The hardest part for the track on the VHS was that it was a mic on the camera so the audio made sense in relation to the camera, I pretty much left that alone & put some of that in the rear's & mid when that was the way the audio was actually coming from.

Just like video, acquiring your audio the RIGHT way is better then fixing it in post. Key word is PLAN.

Coming from a sound background I will have to totally disagree. Lord of the Rings sounded well because it was done well. There is a standard convention because of how the mind percieves sound. You have two ears that listen in surround. I I was having a conversation with you standing in front of me my mind says I should hear you right in front of me, not behind me, to the left or right. If you start messing with that and say make your voice feel somewhat behind me the mind does a wtf. It can actually make people sick because you are causing improper sensory perceptions between the ears and eyes.

Sure you can mix on radio shack equipment and you can make movies with a handycam, but bad sound equipment and bad software in a bad room will cause you to make terrible mixing choices. A bad untreated room alone will be filled with crazy room modes that artificially boost and cut freqs. depending on where you are mixing in the room.

And my main point is if audio is not your craft don't try and jump from a mono mic to full on surround. Stick to mono and stereo first. It's like me trying to make a full length film after only being in video for a little over a yr.

Lord Of The Rings sounded amazing because they threw buckets of money (and time) at it and used sound engineers with expertise and experience - virtually no sync dialog (i.e. was almost all ADR), and FX, Foley, Atmos & Music were all recorded specifically for surround using good surround microphones and techniques.

...And at the other extreme from LOTR, I did a half-dozen projects a few years back, including two two-hour documentaries, in 4-channel surround sound.

I mounted two stereo mics on the top of the camera, with the forward one recording to tape and the rearward one to a separate recorder. No timecode on the rear, unfortunately.

After all the video editing I went back to the rear audio and pulled up and sync'd the individual audio clips. Slow going but one eventually developed a technique that moved things along.

The final results as played back on a home-theater surround setup were stunning, and very different from the typical synthesized surround of Hollywood cinema. This was actual surround sound, recorded as if you were there. But it was a lot of work.

The four audio tracks were encoded as DolbyDigital 2/2 to the DVD. The Dolby center channel was meant to localize dialogue on a typical fifty-foot movie screen (for people sitting to the side of the theater), so I don't bother with it for home viewing. And the .1 was meant for special effects, so it's not needed either.

Would I deliver surround again? You bet, but only if I was paid handsomely for all the time it took.

Don't really need timecode for the rear if you do this: Measure distance between front mics and rear. Sound travels one foot per milli-second. Instead of a clapboard just use a pair of drum sticks and whack out a 4 count at the beginning of the take or everytime you change microphone positions. Yeah you might look dumb but if you explain it correctly people will think you know what you're doing.

So if the distance is 20 feet your 4 count on the rear should be offset/slipped from the front by 20 ms. Easy to do in good audio editiing software, not so sure about trying it in Vegas. You would actually want some offset to give a spatial relationship.

What am I missing with this VI Stereo to 5.1? I've installed it, but nothing shows in Vegas, nor any desktop icons etc. There is a folder under 'programs' but only a PDF manual in there.

Arthur,

I just tried to install it. It is a VST and by default installs in C:\Program Files (86)\Vstplugins. You can specify the Vegas VST folder for installation or else tell Vegas to also include the default installation folder for VST plugins (Preferences-VST Effects).

It does show if the above is followed.

Hope that helps
Willem.

I don't see a Vegas VST folder Willem?

Ah, OK, found it under 'non-real-time effects'. Was looking under the usual extensions menus. When I select it, it wants to render as a Take 2 to the default template. Is that the correct one??

What a lot of people do not seem to understand is that 5.1 for film & 5.1 for music are very different disciplines, requiring substantially different mixing techniques.
With film, the centre channel belongs to the dialogue for very good reasons.
1 - Dubbing to different languages.
2 - Avoiding "exit sign" syndrome, where dialogue coming from anywhere except centre distracts from the film itself.
With music, the main rule is "there are no rules" - if it sounds right it is right.

We've been mixing surround for 12 years now and it is a heck of a lot easier to get a well balanced surround mix than it is a stereo one as you do not need nearly as much EQ, compression or artificial reverb.

To Arthur: don't get too excited about the VI Stereo>5.1 converter VST in Vegas - Vegas does not support Multichannel VST - it works fine in other hosts.