In this series of free video tutorials, brought to you with the support of Avid, Post-Production Specialist and Immersive Audio expert, Alan Sallabank shares tips and tricks to help you get to grips with the audio post-production workflows for content to be delivered in Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment, which will be especially useful if you are delivering to the likes of Netflix and Amazon.

In part 3, we look at an alternative (and some may say “off-piste”) and definitely “not qualified by Avid” way of getting the best out of the Dolby Atmos Production Suite and Pro Tools Ultimate, including being able to bring the re-render outputs back into the same Pro Tools session all on one machine.

What You Will Need

The Dolby Atmos Production Suite and The Dolby Audio Bridge are software solutions, so while you don’t need any specific Avid or Dolby hardware to follow the advice in these tutorials, you will need specific versions of software -

• Pro Tools Ultimate 2019.10 or later - 2020.3 recommended

• Dolby Atmos Production Suite v3.4

Running everything in software does also put quite a strain on your host computer, so we would also recommend that you are running a machine with at least six physical cores and at least 32GB of RAM.

Consider Watching Parts 1 and 2 Before You Go On

If you are new to Dolby Atmos we strongly recommend that you watch and read parts 1 and 2 of this series before continuing with part 3.

Part 3 - Limitations Or Opportunities?

Since the release of Pro Tools Ultimate 2019.10, non-HDX users have been able to properly access the full potential of the Dolby Audio Bridge’s 128 audio paths.

But with that step forward comes limitations. Or so we thought…

For this workflow, you will need hardware that is capable of looping back at least six channels of audio. Whether that’s using Dante, AVB, in the box routing or even a plain simple ADAT loop-back. In this episode we’ll be using:

Focusrite Red 16Line Thunderbolt interface

The Focusrite Red 16Line is a 64 channel interface that can be connected to your Pro Tools by Thunderbolt or by dual Digilink ports. It has 16 channels of analogue IO, 16 channels of ADAT IO and 32 channels of Dante IO, on two network ports.

Audinate Dante Virtual Soundcard & Dante Controller

Audinate’s Dante Virtual Soundcard is a 64 channel “soft” Dante interface, that turns your computer into a Dante-powered workstation, integrating your PC or Mac with Dante audio devices on your network.

Source Elements Source Nexus Pro

Source-Nexus Pro is an audio application router plug-in for AAX, VST and Audio Units hosts. It allows you to bring audio into and out of Pro Tools on interfaces that are not selected as the playback engine.

If you are using hardware that does not use Dante for the loopback, you will not need Dante Virtual Soundcard.

Free Tutorial Series

To learn how to enable features using the Dolby Atmos Production Suite and the Dolby Audio Bridge, that have previously only been available when using a separate hardware renderer and Avid HDX, watch this third episode of our exclusive tutorial series:

Next Episode

In the fourth episode of this series, we’ll be looking at keeping loudness in check with your Atmos mixes, which is made a lot easier by utilising the workflows contained in this episode. Be sure to check out the next episode of this free exclusive tutorial series.