[Skwaidu]

I’m turning in Atmos and 360RA files semi reg.  The 360 thing mainly because a lot of my clients are under the Sony umbrella and it’s their tech and all that. 

Running PT, using Lynx convertors, more as interface devices since I’m going digitally into a Trinnov system (and upgrade from the Grace 908 which I keep on stand by, and is a great unit).  I love the Trinnov system (especially when I dial back it’s heavy handedness on the low end processing) and it works well for me. These all feed PMC monitors (including sub) for playback- a personal pref like all monitors.  9.1.4 for short, but my lfe can technically do 2 channels, and I’m multing to a tactile transducer system I tend to kick on with attended sessions to exaggerate the impact respectfully. 

Some engineers are known to brush the Atmos work off as an after throught and have their assistants knock them out, and charge $500 per.  Some even using wrappers.  At the lowest, I’ll charge $1k for Dolby and 360RA.  Usually I charge $1.5k for both.  Say you are slated to mix at least 4 records with 15 songs on a major, and they can either hire you for immersive or Battery or Josh Gudwin’s team, etc...  You can do some math and see if it’s worth it.  If you aren’t presented with this work/funds, I’d avoid it or at least attempt some poor mans version of it. 

I enjoy the format for the most part.  I hate the (well known) tech issues with the format, and the lack of being about to do everything within my DAW of choice without back and forthing through the renderer.  I loathe the way my mixes end up sounding different on Apple Airpod Maxs.  Part of this being apple’s proprietary codec, and a lot in the mystery of user settings when doing playback through them.

Running in PT as well, I tried Logic and whatever built in Renderer they have in there doesnt work for me, not to mention  the lack of any speaker calibration.
Speaker setup wise I'm sticking with Adams at the moment since i'm woking in a converted spare bedroom, and the new A series allows you to  print the room calibration right into the DPS of the speakers (via Sonarworks) so that makes my life a little easier at the moment.

I'm currently in the process of trying to buy a new house, and i'm planning to actually better acoustically treat and build my new "spare bedroom" studio instead of having just a bunch of panels clouds and bass traps hanging from my ceiling and walls. Although I gotta say thanks to GIK acoustic and sonarworks this room sound flatter than many other studios I worked at.


I do not charge as much yet since I dont feel fully proficient yet (impostor syndrome kicking in), beside the fact I work in a house and not a commercial facility. But what Ive been mostly doing is converting Stereo mixes to Spatial Audio ADM BWF files using stems from the stereo mix. and i'm not sure how other engineers, do, but the template I came up with feels like I'm cheating a little bit, then again maybe everybody does it the same way
I basically have several "object" busses to spread the stems around in the room, while focusing certain elements like vocals in a specific spot. If there are certain individual elements that would make sense to automate and move around the room, those gets their own object. I dont really use the Surround bed at ll beside the LFE channel of course.

But yeah so far i'm enjoying it and I think the technical aspect of the format its what is gonna separate the "pros" from the bedroom producers ..although i'm technical one

I'm using the bed quite a bit, even the top as a "middle ceiling" pair (bed oh actually plays back from the middle ceiling pair ONLY in .6, so it differs from Cinematic Atmos' "array ceiling" there), but yeah I too have static object busses for front and back tops as well as the wides. On some mixes I also have a separate "object bed" route that I use in conjunction with the regular bed, just to have different bin settings available.

I've been going somewhat crazy figuring this out, and use a lot of the "immersive" reverbs, especially all things Liquidsonics and the Exponential 3D's, but I tend to gravitate most towards the ones that lets me use them more as "individual stereo" units, i.e. customize paramenters per plane to create a more realistic room. Cinematic Rooms Pro is pretty great in this regard, though Exponential gives more control to the "above bed" ceiling outputs. I do also work in a more "discrete" manner in some instances, i.e. just sending a mono or stereo element to a location/plane and have maybe just a stereo reverb or delay for it in a different place.

I also employ Halo 3D and Penteo quite often, sometimes Halo can do a pretty good job of creating an immersive reverb out of an existing wet stereo signal.

I've also gravitated towards having a "2buss" via setting up auxes and masters for all the bed and object outputs, I'm driving a send from all mix tracks to key a compressor on them (not on all styles ofc) etc. I also have Hornet's SAMP but it's not that good sounding, and also a massive resource hog.

(BTW, I tried to edit e-cue's reply out of this but the formatting went wonky - seems that I need to learn this forum!  )