[Oscar Santamaría]

Thanks for your answer Andy. I gave a thought to nesting them but, since I need to output to omf or aaf how will this show up? Will it read from the nested audio all of the channels and translate them as separate channels or will it just export one submixed track?

I hope there was a way of “unnesting” them once the edit is locked. If that was possible it would be my way to go. The other option I see is to match frame later and substitute the nested audio with the original files, but this a 90 min (at least) documentary and I don’t wanna put myself into such a nightmare.

[Oscar Santamaría]

Hi Andy! Thanks for your interest. I don’t have any screenshots to help you understand but I can try to make myself more clear.

On fcpx, as you might know, there are no audio tracks, instead of that each source is categorized as an audio component and no matter how many of those you have, they can be represented as a single item in the timeline. You can edit dealing with just one item and access any time the components it has. Kind of like a compound clip.

What I’m looking after is something like this but in Premiere to be delivered as omf or aaf for pro tools. A way of having all the audio sources represented as a single item in my timeline so I don’t have to deal with 3 or 4 audio tracks (each source) when cutting. I don’t know if the usual procedure when having multiple audio sources is to have each one of them on one track, but seems to me quite messy to cut having so many tracks to keep an eye on.

My concerns are because I won’t be finishing the audio in Premiere, but instead it will go to pro tools to be mixed by somebody else so I have to provide every audio sources synced to him.

I want to achieve this in two different clip configurations:

1) 1 video source + 3 audio sources (1 file with three channels)

2) 2 video sources + 3 audio sources (1 file with three channels)

In the second situation I would like to do multicams, so another factor comes to scene since I haven’t found a way yet to recover the 3 audio sources from the original timeline when flattening the multicam.

I guess for the first (simple) configuration there are different possible scenarios:

A) Keep each audio channel on a different track and link all of them to the video file. Edit with that (which is what I would like to avoid) and handle everything to post via omf or aaf. This seems like the safest, more traditional, option. I would have to deal with having more tracks that I would like to but I can keep an eye all the time on what is going on.

B) Make the audio tracks in the timeline multichannel and have the three audio channels in just one track. Sounds good at first because I will be dealing with just one item and keep all channels but I don’t know how this is gonna map out when in protools, specially if a have to cut also clips that only have one mono audio, music in stereo, etc…

C) Sync only the boom (let’s say channel one) to the video and cut with that. Relink in pro tools the boom to the missing channels. I don’t even know if this is possible, I’m not a sound guy and don’t know much about how pro tools can handle this type of situation.

I haven’t put any option involving nesting since as far as I know nesting in premiere can’t be undone and I need to keep each audio source isolated for final delivery.

This is for the simple scenerio. Once I figure out how to set this I will try to reach a similar procedure with the multicam set up, although it seems to me that while flattening multicams works pretty well with imagery it does some crazy stuff to audio when it’s more than one channel.

I hope I made myself more clear with this. If not, I’ll be around if there is something else I can clarify.

Any help will be very much appreciated and I guess that not only by me since I’ve seen a couple of unresponsed threads of people trying to achieve similar things.

Thanks very much!

[Oscar Santamaría]

Because I’m under a network of people who work on premiere (they aren’t good on fcpx) and we decided to do it on premiere

[Oscar Santamaría]

Thanks Bret for such a detailed response and sharing your set up. Sorry by the way for such a late answer but I’ve been really busy cutting this and trying to fix this issue I’m having. I’ve found many things on my trip to audio hell but haven’t figured out how to properly solve it. I understand everything you say and see how it works but I guess the main difference in our set ups is the way fcpx handles raw mono audio when they are a few.

Camera audio is no issue since it’s already part of the clip and connecting one more source to that seems to work pretty fine, that’s your case. My case is 4 mono with no audio from camera and even thought it seems weird to me having a clip with one video “layer” and 4 audio connected to it doesn’t results in a clip with one video and four audio components as it should. That was the main point of my problem. The only way of having this 4 sources represented as 4 components was to actually break apart audio from it’s own container (even there is nothing to break apart it does break apart adding an underscore to the name of the clip) This way clips finally show the 4 components but if you blade, copy or do any manipulation things just go messy and then component 1 sounds on component 2 and some other crazy stuff. I ended up creating a compound clip with the video and the first component (boom 1) which is the one I use the most, and at least this way this component doesn’t get mixed up with the others. The others have been placed as well into a compound clip (seems like the only way to make’em show up along with the other compound) but they keep messing between each other. I’m gonna try to make it work by placing every audio into a compound clip as it seems the only way fcpx knows to handle stuff and this not just my opinion but I’ve read about some people noticing troubles when handling raw mono audio which is not part or a compound or anything.

I know this is too weird, and I’m feeling like I’m the only one having this problem so I guess there is something pretty wrong I may have done at some point. I’ve gone from desperate to giving up, I can’t even recall how many times I’ve tried to set this project properly and I promise it takes a loooong time each time so I’m not looking for help anymore, I gave up. I’m just posting this in case somebody ever has the same problem can have a work around or at least don’t get this feeling I’m having of editorial loneliness 🙂

Thanks for reading this!

[Oscar Santamaría]

I’m aware this is an old thread but I’ve searching around and have found this is pretty close to the problem I’m experiencing. My clips are made of one video track and 4 mono audio sources, each one of them is roled as boom 1, boom 2, rf 1 and rf2. At he beginning I had this issue of only being able to see in the inspector a mixed channel with all the sources. I could fix this by getting into its own timeline and breaking items apart until they couldn’t be broken apart anymore. So, if one of this clips is opened in its own timeline it shows one video track and 4 audio. If I check them in the inspector it shows the same, there are my four mono audio and roles are correctly assign. All fine until I started editing.

Here starts the weird stuff. If I take one of this clips and blade it, or copy/paste it or any kind of manipulation, channels start to get wrong. For example, I usually disable all but boom 1 as I prefer to cut that way. If I copy and paste the clip, next instance of the clip will show that only my first channel it’s activated but it plays a different source (for example rf 2, it seems to be pretty random). Even worst, it keeps the name and waveform of boom 1.

Some clips do this and some don’t. Can’t find a reason to it or a different procedure I did on those. Sometimes they even get wrong if I close and open fcpx.

It’s been an enormous nightmare as I’m a cutting a feature film and need to output audio correctly labeled to protools.

Any piece of advice would be extremely appreciated. Thanks.

[Oscar Santamaría]

Hello Bret, Emmanuel and everyone around,

I think I’ve figured out what was actually going on. It seems that, for some strange reason, when audio is imported on fcp x it’s somehow embedded into some sort of self container. So, it can be broken apart once it shouldn’t have anything else to break apart. This is how I finally sorted to have a proper representation of channels in the inspector.

In this screenshot (ignore the amount of clips) it can be seen what I mean. The first clip is how audio components were being shown, even having four mono audio on the compound. And the 4th clip shows this 4 sources as components (camera audio has been erased) which is what I was trying to achieve.

Hope this is useful for anyone with the same trouble. Thanks for your attention guys.

[Oscar Santamaría]

Hi Emmanuel!

Thanks for your response, that’s the case and precisely my concern. If the clips in my storyline are showing just two channels but one of those is actually a mix of three different sources, do you think X2pro would handle to output those sources as different files or will output a mix?

Even in that case there as a bit of the mixing I would rather do myself and give some hints to the engineer of what i’m trying to achieve on a given scene. He would work pretty far away from where I am and I won’t have the chance to sit along with him so my intention is to give him a soundtrack that sounds already close to how I want it.

There is another thing that showed up and I ask you in case you are experienced in sending stuff to protools from fcpx. I’ve found that if you use fade handles on expanded audio, this fade has no representation (even thought it is there) when you expand components and viceversa. So I’m wondering which is the proper place to fade in order to have this translated when sent to protools, on expanded audio or expanded components?

Thanks very much!