Sorry for the simple question today,

 

I was wondeirng when one might set their audio settings to Direct Out upon export? What is Direct Out?

 

Thanks in advance.

It means that each individual mono track on your timeline is exported as its own channel. So if you were to have 9 mono tracks and you export (or monitor) Direct Out, you would end up with an export containing 9 audio channels, each being a 'flattened' version of the corresponding timeline track.

Many use cases. Many use it to send each separate track into a physical outboard mixer. More often it is used when creating masters where you may have to deliver stuff like:

A1: Stereo Left

A2: Stereo Right

A3: M&E Left

A4: M&E Right

A5: 5.1 L

A6: 5.1 R

A7: 5.1 C

A8: 5.1 Lfe

A9: 5.1 Ls

A10: 5.1 Rs

As Job says, there are many uses. In news you use direct out to split the reporter/correspondent voiceover from the nat/background sound in the finished piece that is kept in the archive, so the b-roll can be used again at some point in the future

Job ter Burg:

It means that each individual mono track on your timeline is exported as its own channel. So if you were to have 9 mono tracks and you export (or monitor) Direct Out, you would end up with an export containing 9 audio channels, each being a 'flattened' version of the corresponding timeline track.

Many use cases. Many use it to send each separate track into a physical outboard mixer. More often it is used when creating masters where you may have to deliver stuff like:

A1: Stereo Left

A2: Stereo Right

A3: M&E Left

A4: M&E Right

A5: 5.1 L

A6: 5.1 R

A7: 5.1 C

A8: 5.1 Lfe

A9: 5.1 Ls

A10: 5.1 Rs

Thank you for this!

 

What happens in the event of stereo 5.1 and 7.1 tracks? Are these expanded to mono in the export?

Good question, I have never checked that. If you want to be sure, you could 'Convert to Mono' before doing a Direct Out export.

Other than that, I would expect that Direct Out lets you route each individual (monophonic) channel of multichannel tracks.

Just did an FFPROBE test and a round trip to Avid. For those curious: DIRECT OUT creates a single stream per channel. 5.1 will be 6 mono channels. Stereo will be 2 mono channels. No metadata indicating placement so the file is not aware of being part of a stereo or 5.1 set.

nevermind

I've just masterd a show where i had to do a (what i would call) regular 5.1 + stereo delivery, as well as an Interleaved stereo delivery.

Regular, as pointed out earlier, is setting you output to direct, and each channel goes in order of the timeline.  In my case

L,R,C,LFE,Ls,Rs, MixL, MixR

For Interleaved, and had to create several stereo tracks, plus 1 5.1 track.  So my timeline was 

1-stereomix

2-5.1mix

3-Stereo MandE mix

4-Stereo FX only

5-stereo dialog only

6-Stereo Music only without lyrics

7-Stereo Described Video

The final master file had to have this same layout, and after a few tests, Direct out was again the solution.

I did have to make sure in my mixer panel all 7 tracks were numbered according to their placement, as that was the order direct out followed.  The originally started out with some higher track numbers, probably because of me starting with a "regular" sequence as a base model, and adding the above stereo tracks into the mix.