Exporting 8 channels of audio for iTunes

[Paul Figgiani]

T,

I’m open to better ways of doing this!

Thanks for getting involved …

-paul.

[Scot Walker]

Thanks, T. Payton.

I did a little test. I took a single scene from my movie and put it into a new project that is 5.1. There are various audio clips in this, obviously. I set the role name of all those audio clips to Surround. I then exported just the audio as a stereo WAV. I imported that and gave it the role name of Stereo. I put that down on the timeline. I exported the movie with multitrack Quicktime for the roles and set the Stereo role to Stereo and the Surround role to Surround.

The resulting QT movie has 2 audio tracks: one track is 5.1, the other is stereo. When I play this QT movie in QT Player, I hear an echo sound. When I open this QT movie in Adobe Audition, I see 8 tracks of audio.

The question is is this movie compatible with the iTunes Store? The spec sheet I was given says:

Stereo:
LPCM in either Big Endian or Little Endian, 16-bit or 24- bit, at 48kHz

Audio must be stereo paired

5.1 Surround:
Ch.1 Left (Front) Ch.2 Right (Front) Ch.3 Center
Ch.4 LFE
Ch.5 Left Surround
Ch.6 Right Surround
Ch.7 & 8 Left Total / Right Total (Stereo Pair)

The only reference I see to “Left Total” or “Right Total” in Compressor or FCP X is an audio preset in Compressor that says “SMPTE DTV (L R C LFE Ls Rs Lt Rt). I’m assuming the Lt and Rt are “Left total” and “Right total”.

Thanks again, everyone.

[Scot Walker]

OK, update.

This is weird. The echo sound I referred to doesn’t happen if you play the movie in QT Player without skimming the playback head. If you simply play from the beginning, it sounds fine.

Here is a screenshot of the info QT Player gives me for the resulting movie.

This is it, right?

I’m using Bitmax as the iTunes Store aggregator and I’ll send a test file to them on Monday and see if they can tell me if this is technically right or not.

Thank you so much for all your time on a Saturday!

Scot

[Scot Walker]

OK, I got it. 🙂

This is what I did and it works.

1. Exported as Stereo WAV
2. Imported that stereo WAV and set it to a custom role name “Stereo”
3. Laid it down in the timeline
4. Exported Master File with Roles set to Multitrack Quicktime
5. Make sure the first audio role is set to Surround and select from the Role label menu all of the audio roles I have (Dialogue, Effects, Music) but do not have the role Stereo selected.
6. Add an audio track and select the Stereo role name and make sure all the others are deselected. Set this role to Stereo.
7. Export it

It’s important to have the order of the roles as surround first, then stereo.

If I import this resulting QT movie into FCP X, it automatically treats it as “5.1 + Stereo”. Yay!

The first test I did where I posted the QT Player info in this thread was wrong because I had the stereo role on top and the surround on the bottom, which resulted in a “Custom” audio setup and wasn’t right. You need surround first, then stereo.

Thanks everyone!!! I’ll post an update about my experience with iTunes Store when it goes live.

[Scot Walker]

Well, the iTunes Store aggregator, Bitmax, told me that my test clip won’t work. They said I need each channel on a different track in the QT movie.

They sent me a detailed PDF on how to do this in FCP 7, but they don’t know how to do it in FCP X.

Ugh.

[T. Payton]

Scott,

That is actually easy quite easy, and I believe we covered it in the above posts. Just setup the roles for each of the channels you need to export.

For clarity here are some screen shots:

So assign you surround mix (single file that is) to 6 mono. Then setup and assign roles like this in the inspector:

Then when you export, you will use settings like this:

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Scot Walker]

Thank you. Yes, I have Adobe Audition and I’ll use Paul’s last post about creating the separate audio files with Audition and bringing them in.

It will take way too long to delete or turn off all the original audio sources in the movie so I think I’ll export it as ProRes and then create a new Project with that in the main storyline so that I can turn off all the original audio by turning off that one main clip and then adding the separate audio files per his directions. Make sense?

Thanks again for your time and energy on this.

Scot

[T. Payton]

You don’t need to do it in Audition. FCPX can handle splitting the audio channels. See my original response. Sometimes a plethora of advice can be confusing.

But let me know if you need any help.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Scot Walker]

I went ahead and used the Adobe Audition method and my test movie passed. The only thing Bitmax noted about the movie was the channels didn’t have labels in channels 1-6. Opening it up in Audition showed them labeled with numbers, not Left Right Center, etc. The mono tracks for each of those were labeled in FCP X and had roles assigned to them with those labels.

But they were the right channels in the right tracks in the QT movie so that’s all that matters. I can get my feature film on iTunes now. Phew.

Thanks again for all of your help. It takes patience and I really appreciate the effort.

Scot

[Scot Walker]

Ha!!! WAV has a 4 gig file size limit and my feature film hit that file size before finishing. Ugh!!