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Participating Frequently
August 11, 2021
Question

Missing 4 channel / ambisonic audio export setting

  • August 11, 2021
  • 13 replies
  • 5712 views
I edited and uploaded a couple of videos to YouTube which had an ambisonic AmbiX audio track, which I'd prepared in the normal way by selecting adaptive multichannel audio in the sequence settings, but when I viewed the video back on my headset it wasn't ambisonic, it wasn't even stereo, it was mono.
 
Because it's been a while since I last put together an ambisonic VR video I did a quick search to check if I'd done everything correctly, and indeed I did set everything up properly in the first place, but I seem to have a missing option on the Audio channels tab of the export settings - I'm not getting the 4 channel option, I'm just getting options for Mono, Stereo, and 5.1, even though I am getting the Audio is ambisonics tickbox at the bottom, but because it's not exporting 4 channel B format audio there's nothing for YouTube to latch on to.
 
(I see somebody else has had the same problem but the only response from a community manager is to say they're moving it to this forum)

13 replies

Participant
August 31, 2021

WOW! Ive seriously been going insane trying to figure out what I was doing wrong when before it was pretty straightforward and Premiere even did a pretty good job auto detecting various clips with ambisonic/binaural audio.... I even tried exporting raw audio data back through ambisonic player in every possible export setting...
Still... no worky... 
I'm relieved to know there is a glitch but pretty frustrated almost angered I wasted so much time trying to get my hear straight.  
What do we gotta do? Instal old version??  This is a REALLY BIG deal!

Participant
August 18, 2021

I wanted to also report & confirm that the option to select a 4-channel output from Adobe Premiere / Media Encoder means that any Ambisonic Tracks are being output as mono tracks. I was disappointed to see that the update yesterday did not fix this. And reverting back to the previous version of Adobe Premiere 2020 / Adobe Premiere 14.9 not only also didn't work, but it also mean that I had to recreate the sequence I wanted to export because you can't save an Adobe Premiere 2021 project and open it up in Adobe Premiere 2020. I tried Final Cut Pro XML export, but even that didn't fully work as it's buggy and not well supported.

 

I did however find a workaround in combining the externally-produced ambisonic file back into my exported 360 video via ffmpeg. This took a lot of trial and error since it's hard to monitor ambisonic audio locally, and YouTube takes a long time to process these file. Here are the commands that worked for me. I'm sure there's ways to consolidate these commands, but I've found that it was easier to break it up into component parts when you're doing a 3-4 step process that isn't working and takes a long time to debug and isolate what part of your command isn't working. I find the channel mappings to be the most confusing part.

 

Remove the audio track from exported video to make channel mappings a bit more intuitive:
$ ffmpeg -i Exported-360-Video.mp4 -c copy -an Exported-Video-with-no-audio.mp4

 

Convert the Ambisonic *.wav file into a *.aac file:
$ ffmpeg -i Ambisonic-Input-File.wav -acodec aac Ambisonic-Input-File.aac

 

Add all of the 4-channels of Ambisonic Audio back onto the video.
$ ffmpeg -i Exported-Video-with-no-audio.mp4 -i Ambisonic-Input-File.aac -c copy -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 Exported-360-Video-with-Ambisonic-Audio.mp4

 

Be sure to use Google's Spatial Media Injector to enter in the right metadata if you're uploading an ambisonic-enabled video file to YouTube. Hopefully Adobe will fix this bug so that folks won't have to mess with ffmpeg on the command line just to be able to upload an ambisonic-enabled video.

Community Manager
August 11, 2021

Hi Simon James Gray,

 

We're sorry about the poor experience. In the latest release only mono, stereo & 5.1 channels are available for Ambisonics audio. We're currently investigating this issue. For the time being, you may use Premiere Pro 2020 for 4 channel Ambisonic audio support.

 

Thanks,

Sumeet

Participating Frequently
August 12, 2021

Hi Sumeet - presumably 2021 wasn't properly tested before release, do you have any kind of feel for how close you might be to finding the cause of the problem and resolving it?

 

Whilst indeed I can grab 2020 to start the next project I'm about to start, I can't really use 2020 to complete the project I was already in progress on, because of project files not being backwards compatible.