Spanner

The Swiss Army knife for surround audio

If you spend any time at all working in surround formats, you’re going to want Spanner.

Designed by real post audio pros to solve real world problems, Spanner has redefined sound design, editing and mixing in surround.

It’s a panner, sure, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what this thing can do. With complete, independent control of every channel, several industry-first features and an incredibly simple interface, it is possibly the most versatile plugin in your arsenal.

Grab the full-featured 30 day trial and hear for yourself.

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For tutorial videos please visit our support page

“I just wanted to say how ridiculously good Spanner is. I’m doing a lot of Atmos Music these days and there’s so much stuff that you can’t do any other way!”

Andrew Scheps, Grammy winning Producer/Engineer//Mixer – RHCP, Lana Del Rey, Johnny Cash, etc etc etc

“We absolutely love to throw a Spanner into our works and there hasn’t been a mix day since it was born that we haven’t used it. It might just be the most essential tool of our trade”

Peter Cobbin & Kirsty Whalley (Such Sweet Thunder), Scoring engineers/mixers – Avengers, The Shape of Water, The Hobbit

Upsize and downmix - mono thru 9.1.6

Spanner can upsize or downsize, to and from all common track formats, allowing you to actually ‘pan’ an LCR into the 7.0 mix bus, or temporarily send a 7.1 stem to a 5.1 output for monitoring.

Spanner has complete, continuous control over input gain and channel position so the downmix is infinitely flexible and even realtime automatable.

Spin, Rotate, Pinch, Fly-over

Spanner offers panning options that you won’t find anywhere else. Rotate lets ambiences follow a camera move, while spin is continuously dizzying.

You can automate an entire stem to shift left, then right, then collapse into the centre.

Or you can engage the proprietary Balls-To-The-Wall mode which gives super discrete 3D fly-overs, minimising bleed between channels.

Dedicated iOS controller app

The purpose built iPad remote control app opens up powerful new workflows for the edit-room, the predub or the final mix.

It instantly follows the currently opened pro tools spanner instance so you never have to think about loading a surround panner… it’s just always there when you need it.

Key features

Functions as an upgrade to the standard surround panner, giving complete, independent control over each channel in a more practical single plugin interface. Each input channel is represented as a coloured dot in the panfield which can be used to control 5 key parameters. Panning around the 2 dimensional space is taken care of by just 2 parameters, Pan (left-right) and Fad (front-back) so you don’t have to wrestle with dozens of unwanted parameters.
All flavours of Spanner are available in Audiosuite, Native and DSP versions – so you need never lose a voice simply because you’re using HDX cards.
Spanner can display the position of your pan as colour coded vertical lines right on top of the Pro Tools movie window. This revolutionary feature not only enables super accurate pans, it keeps the mixer’s eyes locked firmly on the picture. Spanner 3 now offers an integration with Video Slave 3.3 allowing pan-position overlays over 3rd party video hardware.
When using Eucon controllers spanner will follow the currently selected track, just like the default EQ or dynamics. You have the option of calling up a plugin type from the surface and as you navigate around your tracks, Eucon will open the relevant spanner instance so you can see and work with pans much more quickly than with the default panner.
The LFE channel is treated just like any other input channel and can be piped into the main panfield independent of it’s feed to the Lfe output. Likewise, any input channel can be sent pre-fade to the Lfe output and removed from the main surround mix if needed. The upshot of this is that we no longer need dedicated ‘sub’ tracks to create a signal destined for the Lfe channel: just automate a Spanner to send the signal to Lfe only.
Spanner can upsize or downsize, to and from all common track formats, allowing you to actually ‘pan’ an LCR or quad into the 7.0 mix bus or temporarily send a 7.1 stem to a 5.1 output for monitoring. Spanner has complete, continuous control over input gain and channel position so the downmix is infinitely flexible and even realtime automatable. Support for 7.1 to 5.1-or-smaller downmixing is supported for both realtime and offline (Audiosuite) processing, meaning faster-than-realtime folddown is also possible. Supported formats are mono, stereo, LCR, quad, 5.0, 5.1, 7.0, 7.1, 5.x.x, 7.x.x, 9.x.x
Despite it’s smoothed parameters and double-precision internal processing, spanner is efficient enough to run on every channel in your session. Even modest Macs can run hundreds of instances and still have plenty of room for your usual plugin set.
The purpose built iPad remote control app opens up powerful new workflows for the edit-room, the predub or the 3-man final mix. It instantly follows the currently opened pro tools spanner instance so you never have to think about loading a surround panner… it’s just always there when you need it. Search for Spancontrol on the iTunes App Store. Not yet supported on Windows.
With a spanner inserted you can quickly and easily see where things have been panned by glancing at the Pro Tools meters. If something has been accidentally panned to the right surround you can see it clearly even with very small track sizes.

System requirements

  • Mac OS10.12, Windows 10
  • Pro Tools 12 or greater
  • AAX Native/DSP/Audiosuite
  • Authorisation requires an iLok2.

Spancontrol iPad app on the App Store. Requires Spanner >= 4.1 on Mac only.

Resources

Legacy versions

Spanner 3.3.4
Runs under Spanner4 license

Version History
What’s New?

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