Many formats have the option to choose between joint stereo channels or separate mono tracks. For broadcast, separate mono tracks are often required. When choosing the XDCAM codec this option is greyed out in AME. The tooltip on mouse hover just says what the option normally *would* do, but not *why it's greyed out*.
To make matters worse: depending on which preset you're coming from it is either shown as checked or unchecked whilst still greyed out either way, making it seem as if it's not active in some cases and not even possible to activate, because it's greyed out. Took me quite a bit to realize with this codec the option is *always active* despite being greyed out and sometimes incorrectly shown as unchecked.
Further adding to the confusion: Premiere is interpreting the files we exported automatically as one stereo track by default. For practical purposes that would be fine– IF it didn't lead us editors to believe we weren't exporting separate mono tracks as required. This behavior is quite misleading in this context without any indicator showing the actual audio track structure in the file. There is no good way to check without using third party software (we ended up using VLC to verify that we actually did have two separate tracks) Even "properties" shows it as just "stereo" in Premiere, not 2 mono channels so there is no way to tell. This cost us a lot of time.
So my suggestions would be:
1) AME should indicate clearly that MXF XDCAM is exporting as two mono tracks and that this is not only the default behavior, but the only behavior. Greying out the unchecked checkbox implies the opposite so that option should either always be shown as checked or hidden altogether.
2) Mouse hover should in this context change from the current description to instead state that this codec only allows mono tracks.
3) When importing such multitrack mono files in Premiere, it's fine that the two mono tracks get interpreted as stereo automatically, BUT there should still be a clear indication that despite being handled as if it just had one single joint stereo track, the file itself really does have separate mono tracks.
PS: I understand you're trying to make Premiere more beginner friendly by not having us users worry about these kind of technicalities, but please don't forget about the pro users working on broadcast content, for us it is extremely important to know exactly what kind of file we're exporting and we need to be able to check. Please consider our needs, too, thank you!
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