• Compression Techniques

  Apple Compressor panning audio

  Posted by Andy Moore on March 2, 2010 at 8:00 pm

  This is an issue that I’ve been thinking about for a long time while spending hours dubbing footage, and I finally tried addressing it.

  I shoot on XDCAM HD and the clients always want a time-code burn-in of the soundbites (5,10,20 hours of material). I got that bright idea that instead of tying up the machines to do a real-time DVD dub, I could export the proxy files from XDCAM Transfer (MPEG-4 (Perian) 427 x 240 A-Law 2:1), compress them with Compressor using a standard DVD preset tweaked to add TC and burn using Toast.

  This is an efficient workflow, however I want to get rid of channel 2 audio (camera mic) and pan channel 1 to center. I’ve researched bringing in the proxies with only 1 channel, no luck. I wrote an AppleScript to pan all the audio clips in QT (that works but only in QT, it reverts back to normal in compressor). Ideally, Compressor would delete channel 2 audio while doing the other nifty stuff it does.

  I’ve searched the forums, read the manual and know how to adjust basically every other aspect of the audio except panning/deleting a track. I know I could bring it into FCP and remove a track, but that requires rendering and outputting a new file…the reason for doing this is to be efficient.

  In my test, it took about 1 hour to import, compress and burn 5 hours of video (albeit, low res video)…if I can just get rid of channel 2 audio in Compressor I will be one happy camper.

  Thanks,

  Andy

  Mac 10.4.11
  8 GB RAM
  XDCAM Transfer 2.11.0
  QT 7.6.4
  Compressor 3.0.5
  Toast 8.0.4

  Andy Moore replied 16 years, 2 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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