dual mono vs. stereo output for XDCAM

Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

dual mono vs. stereo output for XDCAM

Posted by Michael Oh on August 12, 2009 at 8:20 pm

I can easily output XDCAM60i via FCP 6.06 to an XDCAM deck,
so long as I choose “dual mono (-3db)” in the audio tab output setting of the sequence.

I am confused as to what this does to, say, a stereo piece of music I bring in. The channels are both there, but it seems to have lost it’s stereo “presence” or “sense of space”.

If I listen to an AVID edit of the same piece, there seems to still be the stereo field there, but FCP seems to miss something.

I searched the database and found some posts referencing 5.1 mixing, but this is still good ol stereo. The FCP/XDCAM exporter won’t engage in the export unless I have the tracks set like this.

can anyone help ?

thanks

Michael

Michael Oh replied 16 years, 9 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

John Fishback
August 12, 2009 at 9:35 pm

Try panning the audio in your clips in the timeline left and right.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 2 (FCP 6.0.5, Comp 3.0.5, DVDSP 4.2.1, Color 1.0.3)

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Michael Oh
August 12, 2009 at 11:08 pm

thanks for your response

If only it were that simple (this is the first thing I did) – I was hoping that someone who has the same setup (FCP outputting to XDCAM and having to make the sequence dual mono) and had already figured this out.

In addition, there is anomalistic (to anything I’ve seen) behavior when it comes to panning camera generated XDCAM clips – (mic 1 on L, mic 2 on R, when panned hard left and right, does not affect their placement in the left right spectrum)

gotta ouput 26 hour-long stereo shows soon – would be nice to figure this out.

thanks

Michael
Jason Livingston
August 13, 2009 at 2:08 am

Are the audio tracks on the timeline still set to output audio tracks to Audio Output 1&2 instead of, say, track A1 going to Audio Output 1 and track A2 going to Audio Output 2? If both A1 and A2 are being output to Output 1&2 then both left and right channels are getting mixed together into two identical mono outputs.

Also, when you changed to dual mono, do you have Audio Output 1 set to monitor on the left speaker and Output 2 for the right? I seem to recall you need to set that somewhere.

Jason Livingston
CPC
Michael Oh
August 13, 2009 at 1:36 pm

Thanks for your post. The XDCAM exporter will not let you write to XDCAM disk until you have the proper settings configured as Sony/XDCAM dictates.

I think there is something going on in the actual XDCAM audio file structure that I am missing and that is not obvious in FCP (hell, I had never even heard of “dual mono” until all this started).

The thing that is making me think this is that a SD DVD made from XDCAM material edited in the AVID sounds great (has full stereo). The stereo menu music on that DVD (that I made) is full stereo. But the music in the DVD version of the XDCAM pieces I’ve edited on FCP do not have full stereo.

at this point, would it be better to be posting on the XDCAM forum ? I posted here since that was where previous questions of this nature had been posted.

thanks

Michael

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