Workflow when converting MULTIPLE stereo clips to Mono

[Phillip Harvey]

Hello there,

This topic is always covered when it comes to converting one clip from stereo to dual mono. But what do you do when you have an edited scene with LOTS of clips cut together? I am looking at a timeline for an edited scene that was a 2-camera shoot, and each camera having 2 channel audio. So I have a total of four separate audio tracks I need to get into mono. The point is, the only way I currently understand to get these files to mono is to take them one by one into the waveform editor. There's got to be a better way?

It's super easy in Premiere to grab a whole track worth of stereo audio clips, duplicate them, and then have one be L channel and one be R channel (and mono, with Fill Left/Right...), all while retaining my edits (crossfades, etc.) Premiere obviously lacks some of the detail and noise reduction that you can get out of Audition (from my understanding, anyway. I'm pretty Premiere savvy, not so much in Audition, although I can do noise reduction, use the frequency editor, use track effects and submixes, etc.)

Thank you in advance!

Phillip

[ryclark]

Well you can just do a Export Mixdown with the Export options selected for Master Mono. But I am not quite sure of your requirements from your post. It isn't really clear whether you all you tracks mixed into a one channel mono master track or if you want to end up with a twin mono two channel file (ie. stereo but with both channels identical).

[Phillip Harvey]

After chatting with some other sound mixers I found a solution, although it still leaves the aforementioned issue above unsolved.

The solution is to use an OMF out of Premiere rather than try to use dynamic link to set up the project file in Audition. The OMF brings in all mono tracks, which is what I was trying to achieve.

To reframe the issue above: if you have a track of stereo audio clips that has two separate channels written to it (Left channel is mic A, R channel is mic B), how do you separate those channels into individual mono clips on multiple clips at the same time? I know how to do it one at a time. But if you've got a fully edited scene your working with, with (hypothetically) hundreds of clips, there's no way I would want to do that one at a time. Seems like there should be a way to do that. Hope that makes sense.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

PhillipJoseph  wrote

To reframe the issue above: if you have a track of stereo audio clips that has two separate channels written to it (Left channel is mic A, R channel is mic B), how do you separate those channels into individual mono clips on multiple clips at the same time? I know how to do it one at a time. But if you've got a fully edited scene your working with, with (hypothetically) hundreds of clips, there's no way I would want to do that one at a time. Seems like there should be a way to do that. Hope that makes sense.

In an ideal world, you'd be able to run this as a batch process within Audition. With batch processing, you can add a favourite to the process, but when I tried creating one using the 'Extract channels to mono files' command, it said that this wasn't a valid process for a favourite. Wonderful. It strikes me as being a useful function though. One possibility is that somebody might be persuaded to create a suitable extension for Audition that could automate the process - the facility is there...