Printing stems

Stems can be thought of as submixes for a project. In music scenarios, you can group your tracks into submixes, such as drums, guitars, vocals, and so on. In motion picture, these submixes are often broken down into dialog, music, ambiances, effects, and foley (though some of that can overlap). When you deliver a final mix, having the submixes printed as standalone stems provides some extra flexibility after the fact. For music, it’s great to have stems should you wish to remix or remaster a song, or perhaps create a whole new version with different guest artists performing on it. Having stems means you can send those tracks along as opposed to the entire project, which is also useful if you consider all the plugins you may be using that aren’t easily transportable.

In motion picture, stems have a specific purpose beyond the ability to remix. For foreign language productions where actors are hired locally to dub over the lines, the production will request...