I've recently made a small sci-fi short in Vegas with 5.1 sound. Several of the scenes had spaceships flying in different directions. To make it sound reasonably realistic I had to manually simulate the doppler effect by adding a filter-plugin, a pitch-shift plugin and automation curves to control them and the volume. And it all had to be in sync with the surround panner. A very tedious work, to say the least and very hard to get right.

I've given it some thought and come up with the following idea:

In the "surround panner" add a doppler-mode which makes it possible to move the sound position outside the speakers. Vegas could then automatically lower the volume and hi-frequency content(a simple lowpass filter) according to the distance to the listening position. Furthermore it could change the sounds playback speed to match the relative speed to the listening position.

IMHO this shouldn't be impossible to implement, but it would be extremely helpful in making realistic sound effects in 5.1.

What do you think?


Best regards

Bo