[devinemke]

this is a long running issue with Pro Tools. as you may be aware, there are (at least) two 5.1 surround channel ordering conventions:

Film: L C R Ls Rs LFE
SMPTE: L R C LFE Ls Rs

as you might expect, the Film industry uses the Film standard, the TV industry uses the SMPTE standard.

Pro Tools (internally) only uses the Film channel ordering, for all of the PT GUI elements (meters, waveforms, etc...). you can have your PT 5.1 outputs in any order you wish, but the PT GUI will only display the Film order.

when bouncing/exporting, regardless of what order your bus/outputs are set, the bounced/exported interleaved WAV will be Film ordered. Fortunately this usually is not a problem, as the Broadcast WAV spec contains MetaData that identifies the channel names, and this data is understood by most modern video editorial systems (Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere, etc...) so the channels are lined up correctly when imported back into the video edit.

i understand that Avid had to choose a standard and went with the Film order.
one might ask: shouldn't the PT GUI just follow the actual ordering of the bus/output?
to that i say: what if you pushed a single 5.1 track out 2 different bus/outputs with 2 different orders? what would you then expect to see on the meters/waveforms?

it would be nice if there were a PT preference where we could set the 5.1 order for the GUI. if you are always working in the TV world (like me) you could have the GUI set to SMPTE.

note: there is a preference in the PT i/o page where you can set the default order of 5.1 paths. this only affects the ordering of newly created 5.1 bus/outputs. this has no effect on the GUI elements.

hope this makes sense.