Is 5.1 surround sound on AE&? If not, Feature Request?

[Lessevolvedman]

amen to that

[Filip Vandueren]

Well, if you disregard stuff like the doppler effect and ambience, and just want a mixdown of the relative levels in relation to some virtual microphones, it wouldn’t be too hard to do right now.

Just duplicate all the layers that have sound and pre-comp them.
duplicate that pre-comp once for every speaker and then write a simple expression that calculates the distance from the layer to the position of the mic, subtract that value from the current dB-level.
Add in a damping-co

[Filip Vandueren]

Well, if you disregard stuff like the doppler effect and ambience, and just want a mixdown of the relative levels in relation to some virtual microphones, it wouldn’t be too hard to do right now.

Just duplicate all the layers that have sound and pre-comp them.
duplicate that pre-comp once for every speaker and then write a simple expression that calculates the distance from the layer to the position of the mic, subtract that value from the current dB-level.
Add in a damping-co

[Filip Vandueren]

Decided to have some fun:

here’s the gist of my idea for stereo, with even some doppler added 😎

the audio is a motor at constant speed,
the distance from “+” to L and from “+” to R is calculated and used to lower the volumes and is also added to the time-remapping.
It’s factored by a “speed of sound”, so you get accurate delays and hence automatically a doppler if it moves.

for 5.1, you would do the exact same thing, place some more ‘mics’.
Perhaps use a “layer”-expression-control on a null-layer, to select which mike you want to hear.
Let all the audio-expressions reference that layer-selector, and you get a more elegant solution.

project-files are here:

https://www.vandueren.be/forumstuff/doppler/

BTW, this works in 3D.

[Mike Clasby]

Very cool. I’ll give it an under the hood look, because I don’t really now all that’s going on from the text. hanks for posting the aep.

[Lessevolvedman]

double thanx filip
i got some disecting to do now

[Filip Vandueren]

I made a new project with a 7.1 setup, lol
haven’t tested the final output, and my solution for doppler turns out to be not that full-proof: you’ll hear a sudden speed change to normal when the layer suddenly stops. Easing helps.
But anyway, that doppler thing is easily switched off by turning off the time-remapping-expression

Here’s the new project, it works with a “select mic” layer, so you can hear/render one mic at a time, and it’s set-up in 3D,
I’d love to hear some feedback if someone winds up doing a monitoring test. (well not actual feedback 😉 )

https://www.vandueren.be/forumstuff/doppler/sevendot1.aep

some tips for testing:
1) to choose a “speed of sound”-value: (only needed fpr the doppler effect)
imagine at what speed your layer is moving, for example 36 mph.
Look at the pixel-speed, for example: 287 px/s
now google – no really:

speed of sound * 287/36 in mph
link:speed of sound * 287/36 in mph

and that’s your physically accurate speed of sound in pixels/second (now if only I could factor out sea-level 😉 )

2) If you parent the soundlayers, or the mics to a null or a camera or whatever, the expressions have to be rewritten (toWorld…), because they assume worldspace co

[Lessevolvedman]

haha GO FILIP GO!!

[Yones Rahmati]

Hi Filip Vandueren,
Thanks for your work towards surround processing in after effects. I’m very interested in moving forward with a project that is requiring surround sound in AE and I came upon this post. Problem is the link for the project file posted does not work. Any way I can get access to it? Thanks so much for any help.

[Simon Bailey]

I think it might be better and faster to work if Audition could import AE camera positions and allow sounds to be assigned to layer names.

That way you could work on 5.1 in Audition with its speed and features rather than AE’s pre-render etc.