- Joined
- Apr 11, 2010
- Messages
- 923
I was listening to Porcupine Tree's Fear Of A Dark Planet in 5.1 and it occurred to me to up/remix it to 7.1.4 using Source Separation.
Steven Wilson mixed this in a convenient way, in that there are no drums in the center channel, so I was able to do Stereo Source Separation on the front pair of channels, and the rear pair, to get 4 drum channels for the height speakers.
That would have been enough to give a 5.1.4 results but I wanted to go for 7.1.4 so tried another experiment that I think came out well.
I took the bass stems, resulting from the fronts AND rears stereo pairs, and routed them to the Side Surround channels in the 7.1.4 remix. At first this resulted in a mono bass sound, that felt as if it was coming from right overhead, and it wasn't as distinct from other instruments as I would like. So, I tried a producer's trick for widening a mono bass track and added a crossover at 180Hz (chosen by ear), routing the low end to the left side surround and high end to the right side surround. Now the bass sits in the "bed" layer of speakers, is distinct as a separate instrument source, and clearly in "stereo" as you get the growl from the left and the snap from the right.
Tools Used:
And here is what the resulting 7.1.4 track (Let's Sleep Together) looks like in foobar2000:
Steven Wilson mixed this in a convenient way, in that there are no drums in the center channel, so I was able to do Stereo Source Separation on the front pair of channels, and the rear pair, to get 4 drum channels for the height speakers.
That would have been enough to give a 5.1.4 results but I wanted to go for 7.1.4 so tried another experiment that I think came out well.
I took the bass stems, resulting from the fronts AND rears stereo pairs, and routed them to the Side Surround channels in the 7.1.4 remix. At first this resulted in a mono bass sound, that felt as if it was coming from right overhead, and it wasn't as distinct from other instruments as I would like. So, I tried a producer's trick for widening a mono bass track and added a crossover at 180Hz (chosen by ear), routing the low end to the left side surround and high end to the right side surround. Now the bass sits in the "bed" layer of speakers, is distinct as a separate instrument source, and clearly in "stereo" as you get the growl from the left and the snap from the right.
Tools Used:
AudioMuxer to extract the 5.1 PCM track from the DVD and resample things when needed
Plogue Bidule to make stereo pairs from the 5.1 (but other tools could have been used)
Demucs for Source Separation
Plogue Bidule to remix/remaster 9 stereo stems into the final 7.1.4 (front and back seperated sources and the original C and LFE stereo pair)
A 7.1.4 capable version of my ebur128 measurement tool, to make sure the dynamics of the final 7.1.4 product were within 0.5 dB of the 5.1 source
Here's what the remix/remaster PB looked like:And here is what the resulting 7.1.4 track (Let's Sleep Together) looks like in foobar2000:
From top to bottom the first 5 waveforms are the 5.1 "bed" layout, 6 and 7 are the side surrounds (stereo bass in this case) followed by the front height and rear height speakers (4 channel drums in this case).
As I mentioned this track has only Steven's lead vocal in C. No drums or other instruments.
For comparison, this is what you get with Penteo16 Pro 5.1 to 7.1.4:
So nowhere near the "WOW" of separate instruments in different channels (plus it looks to be mixing signals from LF and RF into C).
I'm happy to share the PB layouts if anyone is interested, although it does use some non-free VSTs for remastering, Namely SoftTube Drawmer S73 for analog warmth/character and to add back some "air" that gets lost with source separation.