Understanding audio channel configuration

- [Instructor] In this chapter, we're going to be focusing entirely on the audio to make sure our project is sounding its best. Before doing so, however, I thought it might be useful to explain a few things about the properties of audio and the way things work in Premier Pro. So in my 7.1 bin, I have several clips and a sequence. And I'm just going to load my sequence. It's empty, but it'll allow us to take a look at a couple of things in terms of audio channel configuration. Now the first thing I want to look at is this music clip. And this is a professionally mixed stereo clip, so the sound mixer went to great lengths to make sure that the sounds and instruments were coming out at slightly different proportions between the left and the right.

But it's all mixed to make it sound its best. I'm going to edit just a small portion of this into the sequence, so I'll mark an in and an out and press comma to splice that in. And then I'm going to come down my timeline and I'll scroll up with my mouse scroll wheel in A1 so that we can take a look at this. When I do that, you can actually see that we see both the left and the right channel. I'm going to maximize my timeline so we can see it even better. I'll press tilt up. And you can see that while the peaks and valleys between the left and the right channel are similar, there are certainly differences.

And when I play this, you'll be able to see this in the audio meters. So I'll minimize again, and bring my audio meters out a little bit, and I'll play and take a look at the left and the right channels here. (contemporary music) Alright, so besides the audio being hot, or mixed very loudly, which music often is, you can see that we had differences between the left and the right channel.

And again, music is professionally mixed to make this sound its best. Okay, so usually you're not going to mess with the audio configuration of your music clips. However, I do have several other clips where I definitely do want to change the audio channel configuration. I have this clip here. I'm going to load it in the source monitor. And I'm going to go ahead and play and you'll be able to tell right away that there's something very wrong. (static) So the right audio channel is full of static. We've got to get rid of that. In the left channel, it seems like it was the ambiance of the room, although we could barely hear that.

If I edit this into the timeline. Right now, this is a stereo clip as well. So when we edit it into the timeline, I've already it marked in and out, I'll press the comma key to splice that in and let's take a look at this. And I'll maximize the timeline. You can see that this is my ambiance and this is my static. But because both of them are mixed stereo and edited into the same track on A1, I don't have individual control over this. So there's no way for me to separate out the bad from the good.

(static) So let me show you how to modify that. I'm just going to right click on the clip and then go to modify, and audio channels. And by default, the audio channel configuration is going to use file which means it's going to use the defaults from the original file. And that's stereo and we've got both left and right channels. If you ever want to preview what's coming out of the left versus what's coming out of the right, you just come down here. So right now I'll preview the left. (room ambiance) Alright, that's my lovely room ambiance.

Now I'll switch to the right. (static) And that's my static. Alright, so I have several different options here. I'm going to present you with two. The first is that you just change your stereo configuration to two left channels. So it's basically going to duplicate the left channel twice, but keep it in stereo configuration. So in a sense, we have the left channel coming out evenly between the left and the right speaker. The number of audio clips here is still one. I'll say okay and then I'll re-edit this into the timeline.

Right here, alright. I'll press comma. And now, we should be in good shape. The static should be gone. (room ambiance) Also notice in the audio meters that everything is perfectly even because it has duplicated the left channel twice. (room ambiance) Another option would be to change it to a mono clip. So now I'll right click and choose modify, audio channels, and here, I'm going to change my clip channel format to mono, and then number of audio clips, you can have single mono or dual mono.

In this case, we don't want two mono sources. So we want to keep it with one, we want the left channel, I'll say okay. And what this is telling me is that while it's changing this, it's not going to change the clip any other time that I've already edited it into the sequence. Which is fine, I'll say yes. And let's edit this one down, I'll press comma, and I'm going to maximize the timeline so you can see this. Alright so, it's just slightly different. It's going to sound the same because here, we have duplicated the left channel twice and it's panned to the middle.

And here, I just have the left channel once, and it's also panned to the middle. So when I play this, take a look at the audio meters and you'll see that it's basically the same thing. (room ambiance) So the integrity of the audio is basically identical, but the stereo clips levels will just be a little bit higher because of the duplication. Both of these are suitable solutions for this case but I just want to explain that if you drop a stereo clip in, then both channels will be edited in together.

And each audio channel will play in stereo between the left and the right speakers. When you drop a mono channel in, then it will adjust the clip to pan the audio in the middle so that the sound comes out equally between the two speakers. The only reason that these are now basically behaving the same is that we instructed the audio configuration to basically duplicate the left channel twice, okay? Now I want to come back over to this clip right here. I'm going to load it in the source monitor and I'll play it, and when I do, take a look at the audio meters and see if you can tell what's going on.

- There's a lot of brewery's out there preaching quality first and using high quality ingredients. - [Instructor] So what's going on here is that we have two mic sources mixed into the same clip. Let's check out what's what. So I'm going to right click, and then modify, and audio channels. And here we don't have anything that's so drastically bad as that static, but we probably do want to fix this. So, let's preview the left channel. - [Casey] I think first and foremost, is just quality. There's a lot of brewery's out there.

- [Instructor] Alright, that sounds pretty great to me. And now, let's preview the right channel. - [Casey] Preaching quality first and using high quality ingredients. - [Instructor] So the left channel is what we want. That is the boom microphone aimed right at Casey. The right channel is likely the onboard camera mic. So let's do one of the things that we just learned. Since the left channel is good, if we want to keep it stereo, I can just duplicate the left channel twice, and say okay, and we'll edit this in to the end here.

Comma, alright and I'll maximize with tilt up, and here we have the left channel duplicated twice, so it'll be coming out evenly from the left and the right speaker. - First in using high quality ingredients. - [Instructor] A fairly identical operation would be to turn it to a mono clip because then Premier Pro would pan it to the middle. So right click, and modify, audio channels. We'll change it to mono and we want the left channel and okay, and again, it's telling me that anything already edited into the timeline won't be affected.

And we'll edit that down. And I'll maximize and you can see that while visually it's different, the integrity of the audio is basically the same. - Um preaching quality first and using high quality. - [Instructor] However, let's imagine something for just a moment. Rather than having one superior mic source, and one inferior mic source, like we have here with Casey, imagine that we're doing a two-person interview and they're both good, but one person speaks very loudly and the other speaks very quietly.

Can you tell how that would be very difficult to change in this situation? Right now, I only have the ability to raise or lower the volume of the clip on this track. If I want to break it out and get it on two tracks, then I'm going to need to switch it to dual mono. So again, we are imagining a little bit because I don't have a clip where I do have two people speaking at once, but I think it'll be fairly easy to simulate. So I'm going to go back to my audio channel configuration and I'm going to switch this from mono one audio clips to two audio clips.

And so here, let's imagine that this is the superior audio from person one and this is the superior audio from person two. I'll say okay, it'll give me my warning, I'll say yes. And then let's edit this in. I want to show you what happens here. Comma and tilt it to maximize. And here, you can see that it's edited each of those sources on a different track, okay? So again, these are both Casey, but imagine that this is person one and this is person two. Now if we want to lower person one and raise person two, we have that control.

Okay so this a dual mono environment and can be very useful when you have two audio sources that you want to keep but modify at different levels. Of course, now that we've edited these on to two separate tracks, they'll both be playing out from the middle. - Preaching quality first and using high quality ingredients. - [Instructor] Okay, so again, that was just a hypothetical. We actually wouldn't want to keep the lower quality audio in this case. So I'll go ahead and delete this clip, but that can be very useful when you have multiple audio channels that you want to keep, but modify separately.

Alright, so bottom line, you're going to be working with all types of audio in Premier Pro and it's good to know exactly what's happening when you're working with stereo and mono clips, and when you might want to reconfigure those channel settings.