Mixing the Fast X soundtrack in Dolby Atmos
For the latest film, Fast X, the franchise tapped Daniel Rowland and Matt Guiler of Immersive Mixers to mix songs on the accompanying soundtrack in Dolby Atmos. Atmos and other spatial audio formats have become the industry standard for blockbuster films due to its ability to immerse audiences in a 360º audio environment.In spatial mixing [link to the spatial blog] and when using tools like Atmos, stems are required for engineers to isolate and place the different sounds (i.e. drums, bass, vocals) around a listener/viewer.
When Immersive Mixers began working on Fast X, they found they were missing the stems for a number of the songs. They were either formatted in a stereo mix, meaning none of the stems were available, or they had the acapella and instrumental, but needed to access the various components of the instrumental – again, stems – so they could properly mix in Dolby Atmos. Fortunately, Daniel and his team were able to use AudioShake to create stems from both these stereo mixes and instrumentals.