Configuring spatial audio with Dolby Atmos in Logic Pro X - Logic Pro Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's open a new Logic project and configure it to mix in Dolby Atmos. With Logic open, let's navigate to File, New from Template. Here I want to show you a few things. If you're curious to explore some already made Atmos mixes, you can check them out here in Demo Projects. There's a Lil Nas X MONTERO Spatial Audio session already here, that you can check out and look at, and it's already done in Dolby Atmos, but I'll let you get in the weeds on your own there. Let me first show you how to start your own Atmos project. So back to the New Project tab, here, you want to make sure that your sample rate is 48 kilohertz. All Dolby Atmos projects have to be 48 kilohertz sample rate, and they also have to be 24 frames per second. So we want to make sure that those settings are set that way. Then under Spatial Audio, instead of Off, we'll change that to Dolby Atmos, and by default, that'll hit our surround format as 7.1.2. Now, if you're unfamiliar with the nomenclature of spatial audio or surround formats, 7.1.2 means you have seven lateral speakers around a mixed space, left, right, center, left middle, right middle, left and right rear. And then the .1 is one subwoofer and the .2 are the two height speakers above. Do you need to have all this in your room to mix? No, you don't. And I'll show you why in a moment. So once you have all these set up, you're going to hit Choose, and open up a new Logic project. Now, once we get into our Logic Pro project, it'll ask us as usual to choose at least one audio track type. So we'll start with just a audio track to begin with. And notice the audio output is set to Surround, which is a new feature because we've enabled the Atmos surround tools on the previous window. So we'll click Create, and just by default it routes my audio here. So I'm going to turn off Input 1. And here we have a track that's set up to output to conventional surround. But notice there's something new happening in the master channel strip here. We have our Atmos plugin that's already on our master channel strip. This is where we'll get to see and configure some of the ways that Atmos works and how we specifically monitor Atmos. So I'm going to click on this, and here is our Dolby Atmos plugin on the master track. Now, here's where we will choose our monitoring format, how we're going to be listening to our Atmos mix. And if you open this, it'll pull down window. You can set it up to whatever speaker array you might have in your studio. So in other words, if you do have a Dolby Atmos qualified studio With seven lateral speakers, one subwoofer, and four height channels, a 7.1.4 system, you can go ahead and choose that here and Logic will spatialize to those speakers. But if you're like most of us and you want to use and take advantage of the binaural renderer to be able to mix Atmos over headphones, you're going to want to go up here and choose one of these renderers, and that way you can just listen on conventional headphones. So there's a couple options. One of them is the Dolby Renderer. So that uses the Dolby technology to render. If you happen to be spatializing or using Atmos for specific Apple technologies such as Apple Music or AirPods, you can use the Apple Renderer, which just uses a slightly different psychoacoustic algorithm optimized for Apple products. So here we can choose Apple Renderer and we can use the standard spatial audio profile if we want. There's also a personalized spatial audio profile because, in iOS 16, meaning phones with iOS 16 are later installed, you can actually personalize the way that spatial audio works using psychoacoustic technology that's personalized to your ears. So if you want to render to that, you can do that here as well. Either way, any one of these three will allow the Atmos mix to be rendered down so you can listen over conventional headphones while you mix and hear how it sounds, even over stereo headphones. As you'll see, there's some cool options here and visualizations of your Atmos mix that we'll see and use as we get farther into mixing in Atmos. But for now, we're successfully spatializing our sound in the Atmos environment, and we're configured to do so and listen to it properly. In the next few movies, we'll spend some time talking about the concepts of bed and object tracks and how and when to use their respective panners within our Dolby Atmos environment in Logic Pro. So stay tuned.