Understanding flow and chanel assignments on Fairlight page

I am trying to get a feature film ready for submission to a streaming service and 5.1 is driving me nuts (not a long trip ).

I was using DVstudio 15 but just upgraded to DVstudio 17. Originally I had the 6 channels of audio finished by an external audio post house for theatrical distribution, so I have six 1 hr 58 minute single tracks linked in Fairlight.

However, some of the audio decisions appropriate for theatrical are not relevant to home theatre, and are also causing issues (mute and silence errors on specific channels) on the QA software I am using to check the Mezzanine file. Some sound effects are also missing in those tracks.

So my issue is how to use the bus/sub bus/patch and ensure that I can add in the sound effects on L,R or sometimes Ls,Rs, and then ensure these end up on the correct channel. I am also baffled because I do not seem to get consistent channel order with different audio codec settings on the deliver page. When I check the output file with "MediaInfo" I get things like:

Channel layout : L R C LFE Ls Rs
ChannelLayout_Original : C L R Ls Rs LFE

Where is that latter "original" value coming from, since it does not conform to the order of channels shown on the main bus? It also appears to vary depending on the audio codec used, which makes no sense to me. Then there is the question of how this interacts with preference settings, etc. Is there anything out there that walks one through these steps in the correct order to make sense of how all these pieces (tracks, bus format, bus assign, patch) fit together?

After much anguish and with some help from Jason Yadlovski's Youtube channel, I found a work-around for my primary issue. The clue was that Davinci delivers 5.1 output by linking the six mono channels together with the Fairlight bus assignment in SMPTE order. If one bus-assigns a stereo channel to this, everything works as expected. L goes to Lf and R goes to Rf.

But if one bus-assigns a mono channel to a 5.1, DV appears to arbitrarily assume this is to go to Left Front!

By ensuring the sub bus was 5.1 and then going back to the edit page and making my LFe fix track also 5.1, then changing the clip attributes on the edit page so that the embedded audio is placed in the proper channel and all other channels are mute, I get the desired result.

It would seem from a functionality perspective that being able to simply SPECIFY the mapping of mono channels to any of the six 5.1 channels during bus assign would be a useful addition to Fairlight, IMO.

[Peter Chamberlain]

Moved to Resolve forum