Looking for a clear, RECENT and step-by-step tutorial for 5.1 Surround mixing in Premiere Pro 2022.

"The other Neil" helping you is an incredible resource here, btw! As you have noticed. I can do color in way too deep for most people, "the other Neil" is a total audio brain.

I'll just add that you can do 5.1 in Audition, with the advantage of a fairly easy process to send to Audtion and get back into Premiere. One possibility.

And the Audition team is the entire sound team for the Adobe "DVA" section ... digital video/audio apps. The sound in PrPro and Ae is simply a simplified form of what happens in Audtion, so they all can work together.

Neil

Hiya.

Firstly, great to see yet another brave soul venture into the world of surround mixing. Sadly though there is no such guide that is worth the paper it took to plan it out, simply because there are no real 'how to mix in surround' tutorials in the manner I suspect you are looking for. What does exist are some superb technical recommendations I would striongly advise you to read. First up is the RPGA (Record Producers Guild of America) 5.1 guidelines.

This will give you the basics that are required to correctly set up, calibrate & utilize your mixing setup, as well as what some of the traps & pitfalls for the unwary exist. Then it will tell you how to handle the rendering of your mixes, and I really cannot think of enough good things to say about it - you need this book. We all need this book.

The other advice I would give you is frankly Do not mix for 5.1 using Premiere! Period. At all, except for valid reasons such as checking sync (although there are better ways) or - and this is the sole reason for me - unless you need to create an AC3 file for DVD or online use (although streamed surround can be a bugger, as you must always make compromises because of downmix issues). You mention that the tutorial for PPro is 5 years old - well, so is their audio engine (as a minimum, too) so no loss there - very little will have actually changed.

Use a DAW instead - Audition, Cubase, Nuendo, ProTools, Logic, Harrison MixBuss, Reaper - anything except PPro, because it's audio handling & panning in surround is not stable or solid, plus it simply isn't really designed to do this - it's an NLE. What I tend to do is bounce off an H264 mp4 file and use that in Nuendo as a sync reference. If you are worrying about audio tracks, then at the very least you can bounce each track off as a WAVE file (mono or stereo) out of PPro and rest assured things will not get out of sync at all.

Cubase/Nuendo will import AAF exports from PPro as well. 

If your DAW of choice cannot handle the multitrack archive format, then AATranslator is needed, and this is another tool I cannot really live without. It can convert just about any multitrack or audio platform project type into any other - I often get sent ProTools sessions and use this to make a Nuendo XML instead, and just import it. Works a treat, too.

The big problem with 5.1 mixing is that for music the main rules are basically as follows:

01 - Do not treat the LFE channel as a subwoofer. They are totally different things.

02 - Never mix on a sub/satellite system as you cannot get the bass correct

03 - Always have your 5 main channels full range from 40Hz to 20kHz as a minimum, ideally with the top end as high as 45kHz in order to deal with High Resolution content and it's pitfalls.

04 - Bandwidth limit your LFE to 80Hz with a slope of at least 36dB/Octave.

There are additional rules for film/TV mixing though, and these are also kinda important.

01 - The Centre Channel belongs to the dialogue.

This is so the resulting dialogue can be dubbed into a different language (so be careful with SFX, especially background Walla) with relative ease, otherwise it would require a lot more work to do.

02 - Music can be either 4.1/4.0 or stereo - again, if there is any dialogue over the music, avoid centre channel. If the timing works, you could use a 5.1 music track, but the odds are you will be upmixing from stereo if you want music in the rear channels. There is a good argument to be made that the score should only ever be in stereo but as with all these 'rules', they mean less than nothing in most cases.

03 - SFX/Walla can be used in all 4 channels but again, avoid using them in the Centre as it is reserved for the dialogue.

The one golden rule we all work to?

If it sounds right, then it is right.

What, exactly, would you like to know? I would need to know what experience you have in 5.1/surround, as well as what tools you have available. Let's get you happening!