Merged Clip Splitting iPhone Audio Across A1/A2 — How to Keep Both Channels on A1 Like Original?

Thanks so much, Neil.

My situation is that I’ve already spent months syncing hundreds of clips (by waveform) inside a few large dailies stringout sequences. At this point, I’m really hoping to build on that work rather than start over by revealing each clip in the Project Panel and creating multicams from scratch—that just isn’t feasible given the volume.

That’s what led me to explore merged clips. From the stringouts, I can trim the camera and audio tracks (scratch + lavs), merge them, and get a new item in the Project Panel. That’s exactly what I’m after—breaking long interviews into smaller, usable pieces for editing. But I understand now that merged clips drop metadata and aren’t the recommended approach.

So it seems like multicam is the better path—I just need to figure out how to make it work with the setup I already have.

Ultimately, I’m trying to leverage all the sync work I’ve already done—aligning camera with A1 (scratch), A2 (my lav), and A3 (subject lav)—and turn those synced sections into usable clips in the Project Panel. Ideally, those clips would retain the same audio track layout (A1, A2, A3) as they appear in the dailies stringouts.

There’s just been so much manual syncing that I really need to build on it, not redo it.

So what's happening when you do the merged clips is that Premiere should be taking your scratch camera audio as well as your secondary sound, whether it's a stereo wav file or a multi-channel wav file, it is just separating all of that audio out into individual mono channels. That's why, when you try to edit a merged clip in the timeline, you're going to see all mono channels, even though you may have had a stereo channel as your original clip. If A1 and A2 are different mics, then the levels might be different, but what I would do is just solo each of the channels and give them a listen. If the mics sound okay, then you're fine because you'll do a mix later. 

As ​​​​@R Neil Haugen mentioned above, generally merged clips are avoided, as you do lose some vital audio metadata. It sounds like, from what you describe, this is a simple project and you're probably doing your own mix in the timeline and not needing to re-conform that mix in Pro Tools or something like that. If that's the case, you're going to be fine using those merged clips, as you are, even though you've got a merged clip and you're losing some of the original metadata, you're still getting the original audio file, so I think you'll be okay.