Quote:
Originally Posted by mbt.fair
So maybe some of the plugins out there are okay for tv work, or pain old practice!
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Not when it comes to Pro Logic. There is still a lot of requirement for matrixed mixes (Dolby Stereo, Dolby Prologic, etc), usually referred to as LtRt mixes. You often see LtRt specified for TV deliverables. If a TV station broadcasts in both digital and analogue they will often specify a 5.1 mix for delivery along with an LtRt mix which they use for analogue stereo broadcast. This is the most common usage of LtRt mixes today, as kind of backward compatible mix that still works well on a old analogue stereo TV. Depending on the station, TV deliverables for 5.1 mixes are either individual wav files, a polywav or in Dolby E format.
In all these cases, the 5.1 mix is usually created direct out from ProTools to the monitors, no encoding or decoding plugins used. For an LtRt mix (if required) AudioSuite plugins are usually used for speedy encoding from the original 5.1 mix. In other words, you really should not be hung up about using surround encoding plugins, you won't need them until you have TV delivery specs which specifically requires them and even then you generally only use them after you've already created an unencoded 5.1 mix.
BTW, you still need a good, calibrated monitoring environment for decent TV work but smaller room sizes and no Dolby Approval means that TV mix rooms are cheaper to build and equip than Film mix rooms.