Strike Overhead Panning Issues....Bug ?

[oulablank]

Please let me know if I'm doing something wrong here or if this is a bug of some sort.
The Situation :
Working on a song for a 30 second commercial . I usually record live drums ( which I'm willing to still do )but since I could not turn down the price of PTIEP I decided to give Strike a try . The goal was to print to audio so I could make mixing decisions later. ( plugs not panning )
The Problem :
1. Overheads on Strike do not match panning perspectives of hats/rides . Actually , sometimes it does but only for presets , only in audience perspective which most preset mixes are panned as , and only if you keep it that way . I understand that once I print I'm not changing the panning but I should be able to at least make that decision within Strike .
2. Due to the stereo only outs in Strike ( which forces hard panning of kick outL and snare outR ) if I wanted to print anything ( even a preset of Strike which I'd rather not ) I have to do it in multiple passes to preserve the panning relationship with the room and overheads along with the hats and rides .
3. Even after feeling limited by using one of Strikes preset panning options and the multiple passes workaround ( I printed 1 pass of rooms and overheads and 1 pass of everything else so I could pan hard after and not screw with rooms and overheads ) I then had weird phasing issues when my toms would roll ! I thought phasing issues would be the last of my worries , reserved for bad spaced pairing on a live kit but......
I know this is probably because of my multiple passes but I can't figure out why ? I didn't change the buffer of anything between passes.

Since Strike has so many features and can be a bit daunting at first the way that I chose to approach it was to try to completely mimic a live drum performance that I previously recorded to test drive / get a workflow / get some user kits n mixes set , ect. I took the best sounding live kit that I've recorded and began duplicating the sound the best I that I could . Everything was going great ! Strike is pretty amazing . I was mimicking to the degree of how much bleed was going to the kick . Brilliant ! Until I got to the overheads . I wanted to set up the panning in drummers perspective. I then noticed that when you pan the hats to the left ( drummers perspective ) the signal sent to overheads stay at the audience perspective . When I did the same thing to the Room channel it worked perfectly meaning panning hats to left moved where the hats were on the room channel as well . So I know now that Strike should intelligently change but it doesn't seem to do this on the overheads . If you open presets you'll see that most of them are mixed in audience perspective . If you find a few that are mixed in drummer perspective you'll notice that the overheads do not match .
When it comes to printing , like I said above I suspect that I have phasing issues because of multiple passes but can anyone tell me how to get around have to do so ? The example is if I have to route
kick-out1 ( hard left ) snr out 1 ( hard right )
then by the time I get to overhead routing everything is screwed up . except for the hi hats which seem to be stuck at 50% panned R ( audience ) So it made sense to me to print OH and room first ( so long as audience perspective ) and then re pan everything to individual outs and re pan once in pro tools to copy panning in Strike .
This all seems ridiculous but I also know that sometimes I can be ridiculous as well so could someone please let me know if I'm missing something about Strike that's making this co confusing ? I ask b/c other then that everything else seems to be working great ! I haven't had the midi export troubles and such that other have had but these 2 issues were def show stoppers .....at least for a moment.....I ended up recording live drums .
Any insight would be greatly appreciated . Thanks

[HD2]

Originally Posted by oulablank

2. Due to the stereo only outs in Strike ( which forces hard panning of kick outL and snare outR ) if I wanted to print anything ( even a preset of Strike which I'd rather not ) I have to do it in multiple passes to preserve the panning relationship with the room and overheads along with the hats and rides .

According to this from the Strike features page you should be able to pan individual tracks and also output individual tracks into tracks in Protools. So why do you only have stereo outs?

"The onboard mixer lets you easily adjust the overall level and panning for each drum, and route individual sounds to separate mixer channels in Pro Tools software."

[oulablank]

I don't have stereo outs , Strike does. Try to route to PT and you'll see what I mean . But I don't want to stray from real issue so please , someone who knows Stike well post . This isn't an issue of routing stereo tracks w/ hard panning.

[oulablank]

thanks anyway HD2

[HD2]

I don't have strike but have been contemplating a purchase of either strike or Superior drummer so I was surprised when you said it only had stereo outs as I thought you could internally route all the drums and OH's to individual audio tracks in ProTools and lay them down in one pass like you would a real kit. But from what you are saying you are not able to do that? If that is the case I think I'll be buying SD 2.0
As for the panning issues, if you panned the hats channel on a real kit the overhead wouldn't automatically pan as well, so I am not sure why it should in Strike.
Maybe I am way off base here as I don't own Strike but couldn't you just lay all the drums down in one pass into individual tracks in Protools and then pan any way you want?

[oulablank]

I was wondering if someone could check to see if they are having the same issues . All of my local fellow audio nerds do not own Strike . I'm wondering if I'm alone in this experience . After a setting is called up and playing back , solo the room channel and begin panning your hi hats to the left and the right . You should hear it go from left to right in the solo room channel as well . Now deselect solo on room channel and solo the overheads channel . Pan the hi hats again left and right and if you're experiencing the problem that I am having you'll notice that the hi hats seem to be at a fixed position (roughly 30-50 pan R , audience perspective of drummer mix wise ) no matter where you pan the hats . The fact that the room channel does this properly make me think that this is an error .
Also , I would greatly appreciate if some could tell me if they are getting phasing issues after printing EVERY channel except for the master . Every video / manual just shows you a few like kick and snare but never actually print all of them which made me wonder , does anyone actually use this rtas professionally or do they just regurgitate the manual and give the idea but never fully use it ? I ask because it does not seem to be user friendly at all when it comes to printing everything . Every time a commercial spot came up I was like "sweet , I get to use Strike instead of micing 16 pieces today but ALWAYS end up recording a real kit because of the phasing which I suspect is due to having to do multiple passes .Why multiple passes ? Because Strikes outputs are stereo only outputs .So this means that if I want my kick / snare mono like they usually are then I have to assign my kick and snare output ( in Strike ) to out 1 and then pan my kick hard left and my snare hard right .Then in PT I set the input on my kick to Strike Out 1 L. and the input of my snare to Strike Out 1 R.
That's where the " not practical setup / user friendly " comes in to play . If I have to hard pan to print mono then that means that when I listen to the room channel and prepare to print the relationship is all screwed up due to the hard panning needed to print mono sources .The workaround I tried was to print my overheads , room and talkback channels first ( while my panning relationships with the room track are still intact ). Then print another pass with kick, snare, toms, ect..and do the hard panning that needs to be done but upon playback I noticed horrible phasing during the fills .I thought it might be b/c of the plug ins used internally in Strike so I did the whole process over again but this time removed every insert in Strike . No EQ , dynamics , or anything else on any of the channels. After printing in two passes I still had the same " phasey " results . ! The panning issues I mentioned above I can deal with . It sucks to be limited in your panning options but oh well . This multiple pass / phasing issue is awful . And this is still happening after I remove all of Strikes bells and whistles . I also made sure that my buffer and all else remained the same for each pass so I'm now officially fully stumped . I know this post is pretty much a repeat of the long ass post from above but I have the day off and when I went to hit bump , I thought it better to ask someone else to recreate and got carried away again b/c I really want to see a resolution to this . Not b/c URGENT URGENT URGENT / CRy CRY CRY / but b/c I really think that AIR is a great team , THEIR PRODUCTS ARE GREAT and the IDEA OF STRIKE IS GREAT ! Almost there . A few tweaks / updates and it will be......unless someone reads this and can think of what I'm doing wrong or how to record it all in one pass ( without printing 1 stereo master directly from Strike master channel ).
I hope all of you are enjoying your holidays !
ps. Thank god for real drums.

[filosofem]

Does the 'Downmix Button' not correct the routing?

[oulablank]

No

[filosofem]

Why not? The Overheads are now part of the Channels signal path and panning.

[oulablank]

It does not offer the same representation . Also , wouldn't that route the signal through the inserts of that channel as well ? The downmix button forces through chain