Digital X Bus

Post-Production Setup

The Digital X Bus is an amazing tool, no matter what the setup. However, the more complex the setup, the more amazing the Digital X Bus becomes. Post-production provides the potential to use any tracks, effects, snapshots, automation moves, and general madness mayhem.

Most post-production facilities use house sync to lock all video equipment together. The same piece of gear that generates house sync can provide the Digital X Bus and all connected audio gear with the necessary word clock to get everything functioning properly together.

In order for the Digital X Bus to follow external word clock, the Sample Clock setting for the Sync card must be set to “Word Clock.”

This is also the type of setup that might be found in a home studio that incorporates a central sync generator.

Bouncing/Summing Using Bus Outs

You may find that you need to free up some more tracks to get everything to fit. You can do a submix and combine several tracks into one (or two) using the BUS 1–8 Submasters.

Maybe you have six separate tracks for the kick drum, snare drum, cymbals left, cymbals right, tom 1, and tom 2. You can free up five extra tracks by bouncing these down to one track, or free up four extra tracks if you want to bounce them down to a stereo pair of tracks.

The following steps show an example of how to bounce tracks 1–6 down to tracks 7 and 8 by using Bus 1 and 2. By using Buses 1 and 2, whatever pan positioning you’ve set up is retained.

1.Turn off the L-R assignments for the six chan- nels serving as the tracks 1–6 returns. Turn off the L-R assignments for any other channels you don’t want to monitor while bouncing down.

2.Assign the six channels to Bus 1 and Bus 2.

3.Open the I/O Configuration Window, and select Bus 1 and Bus 2 as the Output Source for two unused outputs on an I/O card. Route the two outputs to tracks 7 and 8 inputs on the record- ing device.

4.Press the MSTRS button next to the Master Fader to select Fader Bank 4. The Bus Masters default to unity gain, but you can adjust the Bus 1 and 2 Masters to optimize the signal going to the recording device.

5.On the recording device, select record ready on tracks 7 and 8.

6.Play the song while recording tracks onto the multitrack.

7.After recording, with the original 6 channels muted, monitor the bounced tracks (7 and 8) through the Digital X Bus tape in channels.

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