Vienna MIR: secret tips from its creator – part 3

Welcome to a new part of my interview with Dietz Tinhof, creator of the sensational Vienna MIR. If you missed the previous chapter you can find it here.

MIRacle and width

Giovanni: Let’s talk about MIRacle. I confess I’ve never used it. 

Dietz: you don’t have to. If you have better algorithmic reverbs, then you don’t have to. 

Giovanni: I probably don’t have better reverbs but so far i’ve been content with what MIR has done.

Dietz: Let me tell you what’s the main idea behind it. We started by taking in consideration the fact that orchestral recordings are sweetened by algorithmic reverbs actually all the time. We realised it’s often done to add width. In fact, MIR is not so good to give people the sensation of broad stereo. But MIRacle can effectively fix that.

Giovanni: that makes sense

Dietz: There’s a little known audio-engineering trick about stereo width: Shuffling. You can achieve it with either of these plugins (Vienna Imager Pro and Waves S1 Shuffler Stereo). Using them below a given frequency, like 650 hertz for example, they help adding a little bit of width by means of a little bit of shuffling to your output of MIR. Shuffling is a quite simple method to decorrelate the bass components of the coincidence signal. I use all the time when I work with MIR. It gives you instantly the feeling that the sound is bigger than your screen. This is why I like it a lot.

Giovanni: This is so cool, thanks for sharing. Is the red serpentine the a representation of the shuffler?

Dietz: Yes. And keep in mind: less is more. You should set it to around 1.1 (in the case of Waves, as for Vienna Imager Pro just below minus 50), more than that is already too much. If you hear it, it’s already too much. You have to feel it. But this little change gives MIR a very very nice impression of augmented spaciousness. 

My wish-list: yey or ney

Giovanni: Awesome. Should we go to the last part, which is my wish-list for the future?

Dietz: Yes, of course. 

Full MIDI automation

Giovanni: Alright so the first one that I would love to have is to automate parameters, even the positions of an instrument or its direction, by means of MIDI.

Dietz: This won’t happen. For the single reason that MIR isn’t actually doing positioning in real time. As soon as you release the icon on a stage, MIR looks up the surrounding impulse responses and loads a new impulse response relative to this position according to the main microphone setup, and based on the directivity profile of the instrument. The result a very specific, unique impulse response for every position. As soon as you move the MIR Icon on the screen the engine is already recalculating all those impulse responses. Which results in some temporary interruptions going on, which are not always as obvious in stereo as much as they are in surround. That will be the same with the upcoming MIR 3D, with 10 or 15 output signals in ambisonics Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA). We’d need thousands of convolutions being computed in real time. It’s why it won’t happen soon, sorry to say so.

Giovanni: Maybe with the advent of quantum computing? 

Dietz: Yeah maybe [laughs]. I absolutely understand the wish, actually it’s a pity that we can’t automate it since it would facilitate a wider adoption of MIR in film mixing. We can’t take one of those beautiful icons and just have it wander around like a Dolby ATMOS object.  That is not the way MIR “thinks”.

Giovanni: makes sense and you know,  keep me posted should this change

Dietz: [laughs] believe me, i’m the one who wants it most really.

MIR 3d (?!)

Did I hear you mention MIR 3D?! Can you share anything about it?

Dietz: With the upcoming MIR 3D, we go even a few steps further. We don’t have to rely on capsule based recording alone anymore, but we also introduce on what we call coefficient based decoding. This takes the space as a whole. It’s a very detailed way to look at an Ambisonics recording where you say which kind of output format you want and MIR takes care for the rest. Long story short [laughs]. This means we will no longer talk about microphones and their typical setups; it’s like a holistic view of the room then. The interface will be beautiful, with 3D venues that give you a good feel of the space. It’s close to a complete rework actually. There will be also a completely reinvented preset system where things automatically fall in place, like our MIRx presets, but user accessible. So you’ll switch from Teledex to Synchron stage, and the first violins will find your preferred position in both venues. It could even be third party signals, not just Vienna Instruments. I think this will make MIR much more attractive for media composers who are constantly in a hurry.

Giovanni: Wow, that’s fantastic

User-made room packs and new room packs

Giovanni: I often find myself walking in rooms with incredible sonic properties and wonder how that would sound in MIR. Is there any plan to enable users to create their own roompacks? Any plan at all to introduce new roompacks in the future?

Dietz: You could do it but, [sighs] you wouldn’t do it. It takes us about 24 hours lockout to record a real concert hall. We just did 2 two new ones and it took us 3 nights and 2 days. That’s because each position we put our speaker set in takes about half an hour to be done. Mind you – we take 8 directions from each position, and sometimes you have to redo a recording because there was noise from the outside. So it takes about 24 hours to do 50 positions. And you only have raw data after that, so you have to do all the data mangling and all the sweetening. Sometimes you have one position which is perfect in six directions, but then the top direction has one reflecting area on the ceiling and it sounds awful. So you spend so many more hours in fixing that. Furthermore, this is something that has to be done by ear, so it’s extremely demanding. Most of the time you’re listening to test signals, you don’t listen to music. You listen to signal sweeps and the like. This is nothing that people would like to do, I think. That’s why we only shortly toyed with the idea to have some sort of flight book that people need to follow to allow them to make their own room packs, but then changed mind. Also there are so many copyright based problems. We have to obtain the rights to use the recorded room for our purposes. We had several venues telling us, “We don’t want you there because you’re taking away!” You can’t simply do impulse responses from a venue you booked.

Giovanni: stealing family secrets 

Dietz: Yeah, you would never be allowed to go to Abbey Road Studios to record multiple impulse responses. They would shoot you I think [laughs].

Giovanni: it’s possible yeah…

To dongle or not to dongle… The Future of the Vienna Key

Giovanni: the last item in my wish-list is to finally ditch the Vienna key, my fingers ar crossed tightly for this one! 

Dietz: [laughs] it won’t happen. 

Giovanni: oh no!

Dietz: Actually you might be able to ditch it to some extent since VSL is making the switch to iLok.

Giovanni: even iLok online. The cloud iLok?

Dietz: I think so, but don’t quote me on that. I know VSL will switch to the ilok ecosphere but I do not have more details. I’m not so sure if the cloud based thing is part of the new system. I think so, but this is something you should ask the support department, not me. But I DO know that I would never sell stuff without copy protection. – As a sidenote: Personally I hate stuff without physical dongles since I switch studios all the time. It’s always hard for me to bring in software that doesn’t rely on a dongle as I have to call up the manufacturers website, get the code, and when I’m done after the job I have to make sure this code is resent to he manufacturers so I don’t lose authorisations. For me, dongles are a necessary evil.

Giovanni: I can see yeah, I can see why. As you know, I work on a MacBook pro so I don’t have much input real estate available…

Dietz: I see [laughs] I completely understand what you’re asking for.

Giovanni: Dietz what an amazing pleasure to chat with you about MIR! Thanks so much for this interview!!

Dietz: it was my pleasure, thank you Giovanni!