Multichannel Render Template in Vegas Pro

3 minute read

Rendering multichannel tracks to multichannel files is easy once you understand how. Setting up a multichannel render template in Vegas Pro requires that your project is set up correctly otherwise you won’t get the render that you expected. This tutorial shows you the entire procedure for setting up both your project and the render template so that you always get the multichannel audio that you expect. In this example I’m going to set up a 4 channel render template but you can use as many channels as your render type supports.

Important Note: Throughout this tutorial I use the QuickTime Avid DNxHD template from a previous tutorial. You can substitute any render template that supports multichannel but it’s important to know that not all render types support multichannel.

  1. Start by bringing up the Mixing Console by pushing the mixing console button above the Master fader.

  2. In the Mixing Console window, press the Insert Bus button 4 times to insert the 4 buses we will need to map to the audio channels in our render template. When finished, the mixing console should look like this:

  3. Now it’s time to assign your audio tracks to one of the buses. This can be one track per bus, or multiple tracks per bus. It doesn’t matter as long as you assign each bus the audio that you want to appear on that channel because in the next step we are going to do the mapping of buses to audio channels in the rendered file. Click on the square bus assignment icon to get the bus selection drop down: It should look similar to this when all of the assignments are completed: Also note that you can perform the bus assignments in the mixing console as well:

  4. Now you are ready to set up your rendering template. Use File | Render As… to bring up the Reader As window and select the template that you want to enable for multichannel audio. I’m going to select the Avid DNxHD template that I made in the last tutorial. We will need to use an option that is normally hidden so you must check View all options way down at the bottom of that window if it isn’t already checked.

  5. Click the Enable multichannel audio option and then press the Channels… button to bring up the channel mapping window.

  6. In the Channel Mapping window, map your bus to the appropriate channel in your render. In the example below, I selected mono downmix because my tracks were mono. If any of your tracks are stereo, you can select the stereo bus and it will map it to two channels automatically. Press OK when you are done.

  7. The last step is to make your template use the multiple channels. Press the Customize Template button, go to the Audio tab and change the Channels to4 Channel and press OK.

There you have it. You can now press the Render button and your project will render with 4 channel audio or as many channel audio as you added buses and mapped them to channels in your render template. Hopefully this will give you a good starting point for creating more templates of your own that use multichannel audio.

Don’t forget that even though you can save these templates, you will still need to press the Channels… button to bring up the Channel Mapping window and map which buses you want to assign to each channel before rendering.

Happy Editing,

John Rofrano