Losing a stereo channel during MXF export

[stoneranchmedia]

After exporting my sequence to MXF OP1a I'm losing one channel of all of my stereo clips. Been troublehsooting and researching this for the last two days but can't seem to find the right solution. Would really appreciate any thoughts! Cheers.

[stoneranchmedia]

BTW It's only during playback in VLC that the problem is apparent. When I import the MXF back into Premiere everything plays and checks out fine. So maybe a VLC issue? Anyone have experience with this? Thanks!

[stoneranchmedia · Accepted solution]

Welp. All I needed to do was ask here, and then I answered my own question. Here's the deal for anyone who runs into a similar issue: the problem is VLC. For some reason VLC separates the channels and only plays back one at a time (Audio > Audio Track > Track 1 or Track 2).

[2911 Media]

I've had the same issue - after we had an MXF closed-captioned (paid for) and then it had to be done again by the distributor (editor mistake) we found out the music video was distributed in MONO instead of STEREO. I pulled the original ProRes .mov from the editor and dropped it back into the timeline to get the proper mastered stereo audio and then tried my own .MXF export - same issue! It takes the L channel and replicates it on the R, vs discrete stereo mix. Can't figure out what we're doing wrong but the editor did the same thing when they exported to us. The MOV and MP4 exports are fine with true discrete stereo but the distributor requires MXF for broadcast (Viacom, CBS, CMT, etc...). Any help here would be greatly appreciated. Next step is reinstalling Premiere Pro 2020 so it resets all settings to default. This is a real head-scratcher.