Monday, July 6, 2020

[Avid-L2] Can Avid Mixdown 6 mono 5.1 tracks to 5.1 audio mixdown?

I never deal with stereo or 5.1 audio stems in Avid.  I've occasionally dabbled with stereo tracks but my delivery needs are always discrete mono stems until now.  I need 5 stereo tracks and the 6th track is 5.1.  I had protools generate an aaf with that configuration but I'm told that protools can only make a 5.1 track in protools order which is not smpte order which the delivery requires.

I googled and thought I could just take the 6 tracks in proper order and do an audio mixdown to a 5.1 track.  When I do this I only see two channels of audio on the audio meters.  I played with pass through setting it to 8 channel direct.  I also played with the 5.1 order checkboxes but still just two tracks.  I do see it sometimes show tone on tracks one and two and sometimes on one and three.  Displaying waveforms I see what look like 6 track lines for the 5.1 channel but only two show tone.  The tone is hot so it seems like when the mixdown is made the 6 tracks are getting summed into two tracks. 

Making a stereo mixdown from two mono tracks seems to work.  I tried a new user setting just to eliminate some whacky legacy setting I might have but that didn't change this behavior.  If I take the 5.1 track that came from protools it does give me 6 discrete channels but they are in the wrong order.  I see in clip modification I can tell Avid what order the 5.1 track is in but will that allow me to remap the track assignments to smpte order?

At this point I'm just going to output discrete audio tracks and take the file into Resolve where I'm use to linking tracks and assigning them to be stereo or 5.1.  Seems like I'm missing something obvious or there's a bug.  I'm mc 2018.12.7 on mac with DNxIO.  I tried disabling hardware to see if that plays into it but no change.

Any suggestions on these 5.1 tracks or if there is a way that ProTools can export a 5.1 audio track in other than protools order would be welcome. 

John Moore Barking Trout Productions Studio City, CA bigfish@pacbell.net

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