How Do I Duplicate Left Audio Track To Right?

Peter Riding wrote on 2/23/2014, 1:05 PM

Yes, my query is as simple as that. So if you hate simple questions that could have been answered with simple searches please read no further!

If you're still with me thank you, yep I've done this before but today I'm confusing the hell out of myself today.

Usually the need doesn't arise for me as I run dual audio and sync in post. But today I ran direct into the main video cam a Sennheiser G3 receiver into the left XLR channel and an onboard shotgun into the right XLR channel. The left channel sounds beautiful as might be expected from the talent's lav, the right channel not so nice at all - but the latter was only for insurance anyway.

In Vegas I right click on the audio track and select Channels > Left Only to get the good Sennheiser left channel only.

What do I do next to ensure that the contents of this channel come out on both the left and the right speakers? n.b. if I duplicate this track and then right click and select Channels > Right Only I get the shotgun track rather than a duplicate of the Sennheiser lav track.

I only need "stereo" not 5.1 etc, and I don't need to do anything fancy like panning from one side to the other.

Pete

Comments

larry-peter wrote on 2/23/2014, 1:18 PM

If your original lav/shotgun audio was a stereo track, you're good with what you've done. Vegas' audio tracks are smart. Your right-click channel select is selecting the input channel to be fed to the track. Even though it was a stereo audio track a moment before, and now looks like a mono track, it is feeding both L and R outputs with your selected input signal. Verify by looking at your master audio meters. If you have done no panning on the dialog track, you should be seeing equal output on L/R.

Now, if you started with two mono tracks, one from lav and one from shotgun, just remove or mute the shotgun track and pan center. Your right-click channel select does NOT affect the output channel.

johnmeyer wrote on 2/23/2014, 1:31 PM

I just put some audio on a Vegas 8 track, started playing the music, and while playing I right clicked on the audio event and selected "left only." As soon as I did the the stereo image disappeared and the audio became centered between the two speakers, i.e., it was coming equally out of both speakers. Just to make sure I was hearing things correctly, I then used the L/R slider and moved the sound from one speaker to the other.

So, on my system, when I do what you described doing, I get the left channel coming equally out of both speakers, which is what I think you are trying to achieve. I definitely do [I]not[/I] get audio only from the left speaker.

I might add that I do this almost every week, because many of the old videos and films that I transfer often have a damaged channel and it is a lot easier just using one channel than trying to wrangle fixing up the one that is noisy, or too quiet, or full of dropouts, or whatever. When I render the result to a normal PCM WAV stereo file or AC-3 stereo channel, I get two-channel mono (i.e., same audio equally in both channels). I think this is what you are trying to achieve.

So I don't have anything from my own experience to suggest, although I guess I should ask whether you have any audio busses set up, and do you have any "unusual" sound card configuration?

[edit] While I was typing, atom12 beat me to it.

Chienworks wrote on 2/23/2014, 4:02 PM

In other words, you're already done.

Peter Riding wrote on 2/24/2014, 3:44 AM

Thanks everyone for your tolerance! I hadn't appreciated Vegas's "smart" audio track capability. Alls well.

Pete