Level drop when panning tracks stereo

[DingBat5000]

I am post supervising a live broadcast this week and we have found a problem with Premiere we didn't know existed.  When the truck's EVS records a segment and sends it to us for b-roll cover, the audio comes as discrete channels with 1 and 2 being Program left and right.  When it's dropped in Premiere, tracks 1 and 2 panned to make it stereo, the level drops 3db.  After researching, my engineer found out this is actually on purpose.  Why?  Unity should be unity. 

Anyhow, is there a way to turn off this 3db drop so the trucks 0db is our 0db?

Eric Falkner

Post Supervisor

Kavis Production Services

[DingBat5000 · Accepted solution]

For others that may run into this, my engineer got an answer from Adobe on why they do it.  Basically, if you are using multi-track audio, you have to use MONO and STEREO tracks rather than STANDARD tracks to avoid the 3db drop.  We're going to test it today.

[Trevor_Asq]

There are no ‘stereo’ timeline tracks (standard is stereo, really). Be great if Adobe pan ales could be bypassed.

Best approach, IMO, is to modify the EVS clip to be stereo and drop it into a stereo track - this should be unity. Otherwise keep as discreet mono and pan the timeline tracks left/right

Here’s my audio notes, in case they’re any use:

AUDIO TIMELINE TRACKS:

Mono - Take mono (unity), stereo (centre pan -6dB) can be panned and MC (multichannel) assigned

Standard - Take mono (centre pan -3dB), stereo (unity) can be balanced and MC assigned

Adaptive - Take mono (centre pan, unity), stereo (unity), adaptive

  Allow INPUT mapping (e.g. Front Left to all 4 tracks)

  Allow OUTPUT mapping of that track (e.g. 1 to 1,5 &12, 2 to none) BEWARE have seen summing of previous material

also NB - Adaptive tracks have the same number of channels as its sequence - can be mapped, balanced and MC assigned

[DingBat5000]

Yeah, basically we found that out.

Our show's EVS standard for archive is AVC Intra with 8 stems (mono channels).  We made default projects with 8 mono and 4 standard tracks and it solved our problem.  By using mono tracks instead of standard for the stems, it allows panning without any issues of level drops. 

[Trevor_Asq]

I deal with a lot of EVS clips - they have up to 16 channels of audio, usually arranged as stereo pairs (although they are ID'd as discrete mono on import).

I tend to import / select all / Shift+G to adjust audio tracks - and make them stereo (halve the number of tracks it suggests as that is based on mono) and edit them into standard tracks. Less timeline real estate taken up and easier to edit / mix.

I think the XFiles can be set to flag the files as stereo if they are Quicktime (but not MXF - which I guess is your wrapper if you are AVCI).