Decorrelate 5.1 without 3rd party software?

[phillyt2k]

I'm watching a tutorial on Lynda.com regarding surround sound.

It's talking about having the sound in all speakers to create a sense of envelopment blah blah like for ambience sounds mainly.

It gets to a point where they guy says the sound needs to be de-correlated as if you just whack the surround panner in the middle, it creates equal volume across all speakers and sounds unnatural.

He then goes on to talk about using the waves s360 plug in.

Basically, I'm not sure if we have the waves plug-in, so is there a way to decorrelate the sound just in pro tools?

The only thing I can think of would be to use stereo surround panners and automate them to move ever so slightly. Is this ridiculous?

[mr.armadillo]

What material would you want to de-correlate? A great way for backgrounds is to simply cut a (stereo)file in half and put the first part in the front and the second in the surround speakers. For music, a nice way to de-correlate is to add reverb to the surrounds. Not sure what you're trying to achieve when you're talking about moving stereo surround panners.

[FlorianE]

Decorrelation is also used to upmix from mono to stereo: the same mono sound is sent to both channels, but slightly modified in time or frequency between the channels, tricking our ears into believing that they hear 'space'. Obviously, the process doesn't actually produce any spatial clues.
There's a mono2stereo plug with the basic Protools install, working along the same principles. You can easily adapt this to upmix stereo to surround:
left->mono2stereo->L and Ls, and right->mono2stereo->R and Rs - for instance, just to get you started.
This usually sounds surprisingly good; the problems start when you have to mixdown back to stereo...

Cheers
Florian

[phillyt2k]

Originally Posted by mr.armadillo

What material would you want to de-correlate? A great way for backgrounds is to simply cut a (stereo)file in half and put the first part in the front and the second in the surround speakers. For music, a nice way to de-correlate is to add reverb to the surrounds. Not sure what you're trying to achieve when you're talking about moving stereo surround panners.

In answer to your question, I'm thinking ambience. In the video he uses a stereo ambience track. Then when e clicks on the surround panners and moves the position do dead the centre (of all 5 speakers, not the centre speaker) the sound is obviously the same volume from all speakers. I think im just striving for a more realistic listening environment of the ambience.

Originally Posted by FlorianE

Decorrelation is also used to upmix from mono to stereo: the same mono sound is sent to both channels, but slightly modified in time or frequency between the channels, tricking our ears into believing that they hear 'space'. Obviously, the process doesn't actually produce any spatial clues.
There's a mono2stereo plug with the basic Protools install, working along the same principles. You can easily adapt this to upmix stereo to surround:
left->mono2stereo->L and Ls, and right->mono2stereo->R and Rs - for instance, just to get you started.
This usually sounds surprisingly good; the problems start when you have to mixdown back to stereo...

Cheers
Florian

thanks I'll check that out