4 channel ProRes?

[Andrew Richards]

[peter pop] “Can FCPX do this currently?”

Yes, you would use roles to define which audio from the timeline would route to which output channel. Depending on how you organize your roles, you should be able to do two export passes, one for full mix and one for M&E.

[peter pop] “For that matter Can CS5.5?”

For CS5.5 you’d use the conventional track assignments to route audio to export channels.

Best,
Andy

[Frank Gothmann]

CS 5.5 can’t do that in it’s current state. You can only output Mono, Stereo or 5.1 to files. Unless you can deliver your audio and video seperate this is a big limitation of CS5.5 that made it useless for me on many jobs. I seriously hope that this has changed with CS6. It was one of the biggest issues I had with CS5.5.
Of course, you could export video and stereo track, then the me as audio only and then splice the m&e track to the file in QT player and save as new.

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[Peter Pop]

Thanks for the reply.

When you say do two export passes, will that result in a single file or two files — One full mix and one m+e?

The delivery spec is pretty adamant that they require a single four track file.

Thanks again

[Frank Gothmann]

You will inititally end up with two files. Video and audio plus one audo (me). Then you take the audio file and add it to the video/audio file (edit, add to movie file. Make sure you QT player cursor is at the beginning of the file. Also, both files should be the same length. You can see the start and end time with TC values in the movie properties after pasting). Save as new and you have your delivery with four channel audio.
It’s not nice, I know, as I have said, I hope very much that this has changed with CS6.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Andrew Richards]

I stand corrected then. A good question for Dennis’ Q&A thread perhaps?

Best,
Andy

[Peter Pop]

Thanks for replying.

I can add tracks within quicktime? That would certainly be a workable solution. I’ll look into this.

Thanks

[Frank Gothmann]

[Andrew Richards] “A good question for Dennis’ Q&A thread perhaps?
“

Did some snooping around and found this.
Looks like a big winner, CS6 can do it

https://www.retooled.net/?p=317

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Andrew Richards]

[peter pop] “The delivery spec is pretty adamant that they require a single four track file.”

I misunderstood your original post. You can do this in one pass in FCPX, but you’ll need to set up some custom roles and subroles for it to work. For instance, if you create a custom role called “Mix” and then create two subroles under it called “M&E” and “Dialogue”, you can assign the M&E subrole to the clips that should map to the M&E channels and Dialogue to the rest of the mix. Then you can do an Export Roles to Multitrack QuickTime Movie with the track layout you want; with a stereo mix on two tracks and an M&E mix on another two tracks. You could even go further and have three subroles, “Dialogue”, “Music”, and “Effects”, and then you could export with a full stereo mix and independent mono tracks for the M&E.

Backing into that at the end of an edit would be very tedious, but if you tag your clips with roles in the Event Library ahead of time it wouldn’t be so bad. If you are cutting from multitrack audio source clips, you’d need to open them in a timeline and assign roles to each embedded track.

And yes, this is stuff Apple can certainly improve on. I think in general FCPX hides too much of the audio in the name of “keeping sync”. There needs to be an option to see the audio in a more granular way, without having to open clips in their own timeline to do so.

Best,
Andy

[Joseph Owens]

[Andrew Richards] “There needs to be an option to see the audio in a more granular way, “

You mean like…. “tracks”?

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Andrew Richards]

[Joseph Owens] “You mean like…. “tracks”?”

Har har.

I just want to be able to see and manipulate each audio channel independently when I expand a clip since frequently the embedded audio channels represent very different audio inputs. FCPX assumes embedded audio is always to be edited in unison with the rest of the clip it came in with, and that often isn’t the case.

For me, on balance, manipulating blobs of content in FCPX’s timeline is much less fiddly than it was in FCP7. I used to really give my T key a workout and spent a lot of time manually shifting chunks of content around where now I don’t have to make room for a move before I do it. But I still want to be able to have fine-grain control over audio in the timeline, and that is thus far not very well implemented in FCPX.

Best,
Andy