Hi Nektarios,
I strongly suggest to mix in surround and to do a controlled down mix to stereo afterwards. Ideally you will monitor both versions by turns (which is what I try to do whenever I mix for more than one delivery format). But don’t despair - as long as you plan to MIR Pro use within VE Pro, things are less complicated as they might seem as a first glance. :-)
First of all: Most of your signal sources will come in stereo (or even mono) anyway, so there are not many spots in your mix where you will indeed need “true” surround capable plug-ins. Most of the necessary processing like EQing, compression etc. will be applied on the individual direct signals anyway, before they enter MIR. Your conventional stereo plug-ins will do, therefore.
True surround-processing is only necessary when you plan to shape the master bus and/or sub-mixes of several individual channels. But even then, there’s a lot you can do with your existing tools already: MIR Pro’s built-in RoomEQ(s) will work on the resulting wet signals in any format you have decided to work for. Plus: The EQ that comes with MIR Pro is fully multi-channel compatible (… quality-wise it is a close relative to Vienna Suite’s Master EQ, BTW). And don’t forget that MIRacle (MIR’s algorithmic reverb add-on) will work in surround, too.
Apart from that, VE Pro itself offers some basic surround processing tools, like the Matrix Mixer, Surround Pan and Surround Balancer.
Furthermore, there is no rule that you have to finish your mix in VE Pro. ;-) Chances are that your DAW offers at least some kind of multi-channel support. Plug-in standards like VST3 or RTAS/AAX will happily combine several instances of a mono plug-in to a “virtual” multi-channel instance. Just be aware that the individual signal sub-paths won’t “know” anything about each other, in that case. And of course, the handling is much less comfortable when you want to go into sonic details (… no proper metering, missing or only very basic channel linking options, etc.).
That’s why true surround modes are mostly necessary for dynamic processing, like compressors or limiters, where it’s quite important that the all-important side-chains can be linked for more than two channels (… otherwise it could happen that L & R are compressed heavily, while C, Ls and Rs will stay unaffected). The necessity for real surround processing might also arise in case of actual FX, like reverbs, modulation, echoes and so on, but even there you _might_ get away with the clever combination of two or three stereo instances.
Finally, I should point out that it is commonly accepted that music should be mixed in 5.0, actually. The .1 (i.e. the LFE) is just that: A low-frequency effects channel. It must not be mistaken as some kind of bass-management! The content that goes into it should be de-correlated from the signals in the main channels, and that’s hard to achieve in a musical context. As long as you don’t have a very clear idea what to put there, simply avoid the LFE’s usage, or it could wreak have on your mix. 8-/
Kind regards,
