how do you export discrete mono audio channels with video?

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Steve,

It would be helpful to know which format you are exporting to, and also, what is the intended purpose/usage of the exported file? So really, who is getting the clip and how would they be able to choose which channel they want to hear, on what gear?

If you create a DVD, you can have multiple audio tracks that the user can choose from. Please let us know your workflow

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Steve Coulson]

Hi Jeff: Thanks very much for responding. Here’s the deal. We are a criminal tribunal that records all court sessions in multiple languages (live language spoken, different language interpretations according to what language the accused speaks). Our archive department digitizes the DVCAM tapes. I am a documentary producer and I produce in three different languages. I edit in FCP 7. When I am requesting clips from the trial sessions from our archives deparment-that is using Premiere Pro 4-I need at least two languages per clip of the trial session. So, for example, for the scene I am editing in English, I take the English language channel and mute the other language channel. vice versa for the other languages.

The trouble is, the archives guys can only give me just one mono track of the language of my choice. That means they have to duplicate their work and give me 2 x each clip I request, each with only one channel of audio. That doubles the size of the media on my external hdd and in my editing system and is generally a foolish waste of time.

I can of course, simply capture the DVCAM tapes myself in FCP and carry on quite easily. However, for my current documentary, I have a request for something like 100 different trial sessions and each session is 90 minutes long and it would be wildly unproductive to have to do all the capturing myself, especially considering most of the material is already archived by the other department. I simply don’t have the time to do that. Imagine how long it can take to find one sentence spoken by one of 40 individuals in one session. Multiply that by hundreds of sessions and you can see how time consuming that is. Which is why we have a an archive department with a big staff. I did not recommend that department use Premiere Pro.

Both Avid and FCP can of course capture/ingest 4 (discrete mono) channel audio and export 4 (discrete mono) channels back to tape or as a file.

But what the hell! Can Premiere Pro 4 do this or not? I’ve been trying to find out the answer from the Premiere Pro support site, the manual, user groups, etc…to no avail.

Sorry for the long reply, but I wanted you to have the full picture. My current option is to have the archive deparment export all my clips as with a single audio channel. They then re-export on the audio for the second audio channel. That does reduce the export time and overall size of the media, but it is still very inconvenient.

Any ideas?

Thanks Jeff.
Steve

[Alex Udell]

I took a look thru the CS4 docs as it had been a while since I had been in there.

When you create a sequence, the default is stereo mastering.

You might try to create a sequence with one of the other options

5.1 or 16 track.

this isn’t about input tracks, but output mastering….

you can have any number of source tracks that you want and they can all be mono…but it is getting summed to a stereo mix…this is what the file export is picking up.

see page 229-230 of the help file:
https://help.adobe.com/archive/en_US/premierepro/cs4/premierepro_cs4_help.pdf

I can’t guarantee that the export tools as implemented in CS4 understand the multitrack routing as far as the output dialogue is concerned….you will have to test that for your particular formats.

But I think this is at least half of the battle….

hth…

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Kim Rowley]

Hi Steve,
I am having this same problem and your posts have been turning up in my searches. Did you ever get a satifactory response?

2x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 12GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5770, Xserve RAID, AJA IO, 2 Cinema Display, FCP Studio 3 (7.0.3), OS X10.6.5

[Steve Coulson]

Hi Kim: No, I haven’t found a solution. I have mapped the audio outputs in final cut pro so that audio source 1 goes to channel 1, etc….and I have done the same thing on my DVCAM VTR-you can map the audio inputs. The only other piece of gear in this chain is the AJA I/O HD device which is the interface between fcp and the vtr. There aren’t any options for channel mapping in that interface. I’ve contacted AJA and they say it has nothing to do with them.

But of course, you can record 4 discrete channels of audio from FCP to a 4 channel-capable VTR. I’ve done it before many times. Some settings changes have happened since then and I can’t figure out the problem. On the recorded tape, all channels are discrete except for channel 1 which is always a mix of audio source 1 and 2.

Sorry I can’t help.

Steve

[Kim Rowley]

Yes, in FCP the process is more straight forward. I am trying to do the same thing in Adobe Premiere. I thought you had switched to Premiere but I may have mixed up the posts. I’ve been routing through so many!
Thanks for responding. I am still trying to wrap my head around Adobe’s audio workflow…

2x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 12GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5770, Xserve RAID, AJA IO, 2 Cinema Display, FCP Studio 3 (7.0.3), OS X10.6.5

[Trevor Asquerthian]

In CC2015 – which is the only thing I have loaded at the moment, but does work for some earlier versions:

In New sequence dialogue, when choosing a preset, select the ‘tracks’ tab.

You want to master to ‘multichannel’ and choose ‘4’ channels

Make A1-A4 ‘mono’ set A1&2 to output to A1&A2 and A3&A4 to output to A3&A4. Pan odds to left and evens to right.

(optionally save a preset)

Click OK – you now have a 4 discrete track timeline where, for example, anything on A3 will output to A3.

Now select a source clip (assuming 4 track source). Right click and ‘modify | audio channels’

Choose ‘mono’ and enter ‘4’ in number of audio clips

(optionally save a custom preset)

Click OK

Drag/Edit clip into timeline – voilà! the languages will play out of different speakers (and you likely won’t hear A3 and A4 unless you select ‘monitor all channels’, above the master fader, in the audio track mixer).

If you got this far, and it works, then you will still need to modify your export settings to be 4 channel – it all defaults to stereo

[Kim Rowley]

Thanks a million Trevor.
In part I had finally figured it out but your post clarified things even more. I found that i had to create the sequence using adaptive type audio channels to be able to correctly map the export settings. I have created a preset with these settings. Pretty steep learning curve today! Premiere behaves so differently than FCP 7 in working with audio. Took a while to wrap my head round today’s issues. Again thank you for taking time to answer.