Hello Post Party People

Noob alert - with A LOT OF QUESTIONS sorry, and thank you

I am a relatively experienced music engineer / mixer. I’ve been doing commercial sound design for a couple of years, but rarely mixing for TV. Im pretty deep on a campaign that was social only but with cover the brand wants to use the content for TV too. And I don’t want to disappoint and Id like to come in as a hero (or at least not be noticed) and ride the stop change with ease.

And the scope change is from stereo to 5.1
I am a complete noob but a competent google and have been doing a lot of reading and testing in my studio. All is going fairly well but I have a few questions for the masters out there. I really appreciate this community (although its a rather expensive one to be a part of

First I have to say - yes I now know the LFE is not a place for all my low freq information. Its a boom box, a special effects zone. That said here are my questions, sorry if they offend


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LFE

- Can I use a full frequency monitor like a JBL*LSR6328P as a quick and dirty LFE, doing a 80-120 hz low pass in PT?

- I have some 5.1 mixes I can using for reference (where I’ve contributed sound design and music but did not mix) these are all TVCs for big brands. In not a one of them is there anything in the LFE. Not when a door slams or a cannon ball crushes a castle. Is this normal? Just forgoing the LFE in TV commercials?

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Ambiances
- I often use Rx7 to match ambience and fill short dead spaces in VO.
is it an acceptable practice to synthetically generate long amounts of ambience this way to put in the LsRs ?

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Reverb Send
Ive come across a few posts where engineers talk about the LFE and REVERB sends on all tracks in their templates. Is this reverb send a special effect? Or is it to naturalize and place foley in the space on camera?

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Thanks for any of your thoughts and typings

LFE should have it’s own channel, it’s the .1 in 5.1
So if you have 6 6328 monitors (or at least 3), the answer is yes.
That’s because it’s all about the total mix, how other channels play together with the LFE.
It’s not interesting knowing how the LFE channel plays on it’s own.

Your TVC’s are probably all mixed in stereo or 5.0
This is kind of a standard, because most TV consumers don’t have a sub, so TVC mixers won’t put money/effort in creating a dedicated LFE channel.
If consumers have subs, any bass information in other channels will be bass-managed into the sub by the receiver or home theatre system.

Not acceptable to synthetically generate ambiance for surrounds. they should have it’s own content,
have content that is panned /diverged or have surround-reverb returns from other channels.

Reverb sends: mostly the latter, but can be used to put reverb on a special effect as well.
LFE is preferably made with unique content, although some mixers put subharmonic synth plugs on channels to generate LFE content.
In addition to, or as a starting point for unique LFE content.

You clicked down one category too deep, now you’re in video production, I hope the more seasoned colleagues will pick up on this thread..

Super helpful Newmann thank you. My wife gets a snide giggle when she looks over and constantly finds I'm reading messages from anonymus people on a site called something-SLUTZ dot com.

anyway. I do so appreciate it.

Im just doing some test rn, learning the routing and basic panning moves, doing some online tutorials with a barely balanced array. Which i will dial in to do any real work.

I have an old pair of small Tanoys in the rear and two pairs of said JBL 6328's. One of which im using for my center. That way my L C R sound the same.

Thats why i was curios to know if i could use a full frequency monitor as my LFE vs an actual subwoofer. As I have one left over. This is just for now. With a PT low pass on the JBL.

Maybe Ill buy a sub, just wondering if its heard of if people do that kind of thing and if so what to think about past the appropriate calibration standard

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Interesting so the ambience in the rears should contribute but be different than the ambience in the L R

If they were the same sonic footprint then phase / dimensionality would be an issue i presume. COOL!!!

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Thanks!
darn i hit the wrong forum!!!
fingers crossed

Augustin, I agree that artificial tone often doesn't really work and really doesn't have a place in surrounds. Maybe it's better to think of the surrounds as being part of a larger field of ambience, but view production sound, narration and dialog like a somewhat different item.

So you could take the latter and have it in the center, possibly with some divergence, and the the rest is sound design elements that create the rest of the space.

If you're starting out you're probably better off just not having a sub at all and just mix 5.0. Plenty of stuff to learn there.