No stereo bus from a 5.1 track?

[seanmccoy]

Hey all. I've run into a roadblock in trying to get increasing amounts of control. I've got all my FX (BG, Foley, hard FX, PFX) on a 5.1 bus before hitting the master output. I have a scene where I'd like all the backgrounds to be gradually sent to reverb, so to avoid having to deal with this track by track, I created another 5.1 bus for just BG, which is then output to the main FX bus. But I'm unable to send the BG bus to a stereo reverb. Only mono and 5.1 options seem to be available as sends on 5.1 tracks, and I don't have any 5.1 reverbs. Is this normal, or am I missing something?

[C]

This is normal.

Workaround (of sorts but not pretty) Create a 5.1 Aux for your reverb and insert a Downmixer as the first plugin. You'll then be able to have your stereo Reverbs. This now stereo aux can be routed out to a 5.1 bus.


As I said, workaround, not pretty but will get you something hopefully.

C

[seanmccoy]

Beautiful, that works! I'm still trying to get my head around why a stereo bus can't be derived from a 5.1 channel, but I'm sure there's some inner logic to it that's beyond me. Thanks much.

[Craig F]

Did you make sub paths in side the bus?

[seanmccoy]

Originally Posted by Craig F

Did you make sub paths in side the bus?

Yes, all the 5.1 busses have sub-paths, but only 5.1 and mono sub-paths show as send options.

[C]

I believe the inner logic is "no, that's not what it is designed to do" hopefully Avid will take a good hard look at the panner in light of multichannel workflows and delivery formats and come up with a new built in panner that is capable of scaling and routing to greater than 7.1 paths without third party panner plugins or complex routing workarounds.

Glad the crazy routing helps you out for now though.

Craig, subpaths in this sense will only allow you to route to part of the 5.1, it doesn't give your the functionality to send stereo tracks to a stereo subpath of a 5.1 bus. It SHOULD but it doesn't.

C

[druth77]

Any track that is above stereo will only output what that track is and or mono.

LCR outputs LCR and or mono
Quad outputs Quad and or mono
5.0 outputs 5.0 and or mono
5.1 outputs 5.1 and or mono

mono and stereo tracks will output anything.

[The Cargo Cult]

this is part of the reason I created Spanner.
you can pan any format to any other so your sends can be in your standard mixing stem width, regardless of what format the tracks are.
justin

[seanmccoy]

Originally Posted by maggot

this is part of the reason I created Spanner.
you can pan any format to any other so your sends can be in your standard mixing stem width, regardless of what format the tracks are.
justin

Ah, great to know! It's already on my shopping list.