In our continuing series featuring tips in audio post production in Pro Tools from Marcelo Cyro who received an Oscar nominated animation for The Boy And The World. In this tutorial Marcelo demonstrates how you can use the Follow Main Pan feature in Pro Tools to reinforce the location of the reverb and keep it anchored to the character's dialog, in a clip from the cartoon 'Luna's Show' that was nominated at the Emmy Awards 2016. Over to you Marcelo...
In this tutorial I want to look at the question of how to use pan reverb and how it can help to locate our main character in the space.
Reverb is a very powerful weapon together with pan automation in post production, and i will show how to do this together using the FMP (follow Main Pan) button on the Aux Sends in Pro Tools.
The Follow Main Pan links the Aux Send panner to the main channel panner and is very useful to easily get the aux send pan to track the main track pan so that the send to the reverb will match the location of the characters location in the soundfield.
With FMP enabled, when you turn the pan to the left your send pan with follow. This is especially useful when using a true surround reverb like the Exponential Audio Phoenixverb, where the reverb reacts differently as you pan the source around the surround soundfield as each of the Phoenixverb inputs has a unique group of early reflections. Watch the video to see it in action.