Surround Panner with Doppler - Please make it!

#1

I can’t think of a better company to fill a much needed hole in the market.

So often either in the sound design/ editing or mixing stage of a film, I have the same conversation with colleagues. Why isn’t there a plug-in that lets you pan a sound and add a little doppler to it at the same time?
Yes, there’s Waves Doppler and GRM Doppler and Tonsturm Traveler and Sound Particles make a Doppler + Air.
But none of them let you do exactly what so many of us want to: take a static sound, say a spaceship engine, and fly it from Front Right to Rear Surrounds in a single real-time pan automation, while adding a customizable doppler shift.
GRM Doppler comes closest with a dot that lets you indicate the direction of Doppler motion and then you can automate a pan separately. But, wonderful though they are, they’re old plugins with very limited controls over the results.
A perfect plugin would have a pannable dot that could move a sound in surround, let you choose how much air dampening and reverb and doppler speed you want to apply, and we could all have flying panning dopplering craziness all over the shop.

I can just imagine this fitting in so well with the other products in your collection, with similar design and feel to plugins like Spanner and Slapper.

Theo

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#2

Hey,
Yes, you’re not the first to ask and I do agree in principle.
There are some technical challenges though, which may be the reason we’ve never had this plugin.

The main issue is that you’re probably wanting this to run in realtime, inserted on a track (or all the tracks).
In order to do a doppler we need to pitch up, then pitch down - and pitching up requires the ability to see into the future. It can be done with a true “pitch shift” (the nasty sounding type), or by giving the plugin a really long buffer ( = long delay compensation amounts ).

I personally wouldn’t find either of those options acceptable in a real mix, and I also think you get more control if you render the doppler moment separately to the pan.

Thanks for the feedback and the suggestion though… I’ll keep thinking about it and maybe there’s some version of the idea which is do-able.

Cheers
Justin

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#3

Thanks for the reply- yes, the technical challenges for the pitching up must be why it’s not been done well.

It’s often on the dub stage when this need comes up, which is why pre-rendering a doppler can feel a bit clunky.
I imagine a plugin with two modes: one that avoids pitch-shifting up, where your processed sound ends up lower in pitch than the original- ie the plugin first slows/pitches down the sound, and the highest pitch of the doppler bend is the original pitch of the sound.
And then the choice of a nastier mode where the original pitch of the sound is kept and pitch shifting is used to achieve the pitch bending up. Maybe you’d get some choice over the pitch shift granularity or method.

Given that a ‘normal’ non-hyperspeed doppler tends to bend the note only a few semitones, I thought that in most cases a true pitch-shifter might be acceptable.

Anyway thanks for thinking about it, I use all your other software with joy every day!