This is a pretty common request from people who've been editing a long time. Older systems that were originally designed for analog (Avid, Media100) allowed you to take whatever channels you wanted, or to take none. And of course you could set this for each clip based on an imported log file.

People recording audio onto more professional cameras often will treat the channels independently. For instance a boom on one and a lav on two, or a boom into one and two but with one channel down a bit to cover loud noises.

Unfortunately, Consumer and Prosumer DV cameras tend to treat audio as stereo and the edit suites follow suit. We've (my boss, that is) been all over Adobe to accommodate separate non stereo tracks if they're thinking of pursuing more professional editors. Blank stares, and maybe that's not surprising if consumers and prosumers are their bread and butter.

It sounds like Edius is a bit more more on the ball about this than Sony or Adobe are. Good for them!

Rob Mack

Well it's only a couple of mouse clicks to split the stereo pair into two mono tracks in vegas. Yish guys, get a grip here, I could think of a long list of things that Vegas deserves to be roasted for but this sure ain't one of them.
Keep if mind that Vegas was (and still is) a full blown audio multitracker, there's people around here running projects with around 100 audio tracks, it can't be too lacking in the basic audio department if it can accomodate that.

Bob.

Bob.. well said . .and I kinda remember a Script for this? maybe I'm forgetting .. but it does sound familiar though.

Grazie

Sorry, don't recall a script for this, never had much need for it.
I usually have a couple of mono tracks (from the camera or maybe more from the R4) and at least one stereo track for music, although if I'm feelin really adventurous I'll have all my music from SFPro split onto tracks from each group of instruments. These get routed to appropriate busses with their own FXs, mostly compression or a limiter on the dialogue as needed.

I don't know why anyone would call having stereo tracks as the default 'unprofessional' either. DigiBeta is stereo full mix on tracks 1&2, stereo M&E on 3 and 4 and the rest may contain other interesting things in mono from memory.

I also think when you dig deeper into what Vegas does on the audio side the logic becomes more obvious. It's really worthwhile to dig deep into the manual, especially the audio routing diagrams. Getting things setup right can make a big difference to your ease of use and how things sound. Vegas has a deceptively simple looking GUI, it is NOT a simple program, on the audio side it's probably the most complex of any of the NLEs. A good understanding of how a mixing desk works wouldn't go astray although I've done it the other way around. All those knobs, buttons, busses and faders scared the living daylights out of me but now thanks to Vegas (and the good old RTFM!) I feel pretty confident about getting a noise out of a desk.

Bob.

Edward Troxel has a free script for this.
It will take a stereo event, copy it to a new track, set the top one to "right only" and set the bottom one to "left only" splitting your stereo track into two distinct channels.

Mike

Mike, do you happen to know where on the site the script is? The link you posted just brings me to a login page. Thanks.

And believe me, I'm not doubting Vegas audio capabilities or professionalism at all, but I gotta disagree that having to do the commands the normal way to separate the audio tracks, done HUNDREDS of times in a project isn't a big issue, I think it is.

Honestly, none of the videographers I know in my area actually are using their stereo tracks on their camcorders for stereo recording, we all use the L/R for separate sources.

But as long as this script can simplify that to a lot less clicks, that's cool. :)

Sorry about that ScorpioProd . I'm registered with the site so I never see the login page. It's painless to do though and you never have to worry about any problems from Edward's site.

Mike

The direct link to the script

I see you've registered there now anyway. Hope you find all kinds of good information.

Cool, thanks. :)

I think Edward is an ol' Video Toaster guy from long ago, so I'm sure the site is fine. :)

Nope. Never used Video Toaster. I did use EditDV/Cinestream, though. Then switched to Vegas and never looked back.

Edward

Opps, sorry, I know there's some Vegas plug-in writer that's an old VT guy, must be someone else.

Cool, it works, thanks. :)

Only thing is, it's only something you can use once, otherwise it will start duplicating your audio track if you use it again after adding more clips.

So if I have all my clips already in the timeline, I can just run that script and I'm done, which does save me a few steps from how I currently would do it, definately.

But if I later add clips, I've still got to do it manually for each new clip at that point.

So, I guess the rule with Vegas is you put all your clips in the timeline before you start doing any audio editing?

Personally, I have no problem with it treating an embedded stereo track as stereo audio. I can and have dealt with it, basically because I generally just wanted the boom anyway.

However, when we adopted that competing NLE here and the regular editors started using it, they declared this sort of audio ingest as unprofessional and unusable. The contortions they went through to get PPro to just take channel 1 or channel 2 or none or both were pretty incredible and I was kind of amazed at how they just wouldn't take No for an answer.

Since then we've had PPro engineers and Soundbooth engineers here and both groups got an earful about this. (BTW, Adobe has had development groups out to visit customers, get feedback, and ask what we'd like in the next version. I don't know if Sony does this but they should. Macromedia was doing it before the aquisition.)

Yes, people with years of experience can adapt. But if you want to draw them in as customers it's better to give them some features they expect.

Rob Mack

Yes, it will add a new track each time it is run. You could easily move the events to another track and delete the new track if needed.

If you wanted it to look for an existing track before adding a new one, the script could be modified to do that.

To me, it's STILL a lot faster than copying to a new track, changing the properties of the first one, and then changing the properties of the second one.

For my own uses with boom and lav it was fairly easy to just pick a channel as I went along. Each clip was going to need to be looked at anyway so it wasn't such a big deal to pick a channel.

If this is the way your sound guy/gal is recording then you have to hope that things have been consistant, Boom always on 1 and Lav always on 2, or vice versa. Things don't always work this way, especially if you're traveling and picking up a local audio or field tech. But the basic idea here is that if you want to automate things then you need consistant track assignments.

I'm guessing that your channel breakdown was a little different and you have to take both channels. Could be two speakers with two mics, something like that. It'd be handy, and not too out of whack, if Sony offered you a kind of expanded left/right view like it does for A/B video tracks.

Rob Mack

Scorpio:

Unless I'm missing something, the simplest way to go would be to Ctrl / Click / drag (i.e., copy) your clip to a new audio track, then using the Pan slider in the track headers to pan them all the way left and right, respectively.

If you need an actual WAV file for each, just render each to a separate mono file. Audio renders very fast.

Here's the real problem. The DV spec permits the audio to be flagged as stereo or dual mono. To the best of my knowledge all but one DV camera flags the audio as stereo and that's the DPX10. What Vegas is doing is correct. Any NLE that presents you with dual mono on the T/L is in error.
Now here's the rub and I've haven't checked this in a long time as the PDX10 has kind of faded away but Vegas cannot capture / handle the audio from that camera. Sony did the PDX10 as dual mono it seems because someone whispered something in their ear but I gather the change caused grief all over the place so that one camera was their one and only attempt at a dual mono camera.

A further technical complication is that the Windoz audio system doesn't do mono.

Bob.

Dont' do that!

You really must first ungroup the audio.

Bob.

I had pretty much figured that stereo was part of the spec and this was why NLE's designed for DV behaved the way they do. Of course not everyone shoots DV. I was also assuming that it's interleaved into the data or something like that which makes it hard to take just one channel or another.

Not a problem to me but it can be a problem for people who are very entrenched in the practice of specifying what audio to take on a clip by clip basis. So far my experience has been that they have no intention of dropping the practice and just view the tool as non-professional if they can't do it. But these are the sorts of people who've been working on an NLE since Avid and Media100 were invented. Old habits die noisy deaths.

I really don't know if the DSR500 and it's successors recorded stereo or dual mono. The camera behaves as if it's dual mono when you're setting it up, in that it has seperate XLR inputs and pots to set levels. And of course the DV deck we have only outputs SDI (No DV output) so it's always been trivial in the older M100 systems to just take whatever channels you wanted. (But SDI is redigitizing DV into a Not-DV stream).

I think what I'm saying is that Vegas would be well served if it could actually address this workflow while setting expectations about what you actually get with DV.

The other point you make is about Windows not handling Mono. I take it the distinction is that all audio ends up being stereo which is why in a Vegas audio track if you select only left or right it sends that one channel to left and right. It's still stereo, just one track being output to left and right outputs.

Rob Mack

Don't know about the 500 but the 570 and 709 all do stereo. That's got no relationship to what's IN that stereo pair. As you rightly say only the consummerish cameras with embedded stereo mics are recording stereo or some of the pro stuff kitted out with Sanken stereo shotguns. Where the issue comes about is how the DV flags the audio to the NLE and they all flag it as stereo (apart from the PDX10) regardless of what you've recorded into the two channels.

The Windoz thing is another issue, from memory hook up a 8 channel audio interface and Windoz presents that as 4 stereo channels. No real issue in Vegas to assign 8 mono tracks to each of the 8 inputs but you're picking L / R from each of the stereo pairs.

But you're certainly right about old habits. More than once I've been asked how can you adjust audio levels during capture, trying to explain that this doesn't work in the 'new' digital age is very hard to some old hands.

Anyway, time to move on, there's cameras out now recording 5.1 :)

Bob.

Another one here.

OK, tried this out tonight... A wedding with over 200 clips in it.

I put them all in the timeline, so that I could just run the script once and have it split the audio.

It did that, but... Then when I went to move the clips, I found that the video was only grouped with the original audio track and not the copied audio track, so, only one audio track would move with each clip.

Is there any way to make the script regroup all the individual clips with their now TWO audio tracks each?

Trying to do the split manually without the script made me end up creating a group of ALL the clips, which though that did hold the audio clips to the video clips, it defeated the purpose of having separate clips.

So since that didn't work, and since no one would want to have to manually split the audio on over 200 separate clips, I came up with this solution:

Recapture the wedding as one giant clip with DV scene detection turned off. Then put the clip directly into the timeline. Then run the script, and group the video and two audio tracks together.

Then one can go through and split wherever one needs to split to create separate clips and move them around without losing the grouped audio.

This works, but it does lose the convienience of separate clips, or being able to use the trimmer. And it's a problem when you don't have a choice, like with file based XDCAM clips, or even HDV, which inherintly works better when split with scene detection, to keep the LongGOPs starting and ending correctly. (At least this is what I've been told is better with HDV.)

So, if there is a way to have the script group each video with it's two audio clips, that would be AWESOME! :) Is it possible?

If not, could there be a script that would look at a set of grouped clips, and automatically split them where EVERY individual clip in the group started or ended? This would let one put all the clips on the timeline, split the audio all at once, group them all at once, and then recover separate clips with them still being all grouped in their video/audioL/audioR groupings. Is this possible?

Thanks.