Panning audio in PremPro

[Ervin Farkas]

Talk show with the host on the left channel, guest on the right channel - how do I bring them a little closer to each other in PremPro CS3?

(It's so easy in... nah, I won't tell you, it's probably easy in Adobe too, I just don't know how to do it).

[David Beisner]

Before you drop the audio clip (or video clip with embedded audio) into your timeline, highlight it in your project manager. Then click on "Clip" and "Audio Options" and then go to "Source Channel Mappings" and select "Mono". Then you can pan each channel wherever you'd like within your stereo signal. If you're the kind of editor who likes to use the keyboard for everything, the keyboard quick shortcuts are: "Alt+C, A, S" to get you to the dialog window where you can select between Mono, Stereo, Mono as Stereo, or 5.1 surround. Once your audio clip or video with embedded audio has been dropped into your timeline, you can't make that adjustment. Rather, you'll have to "Render and Replace" your audio clip and take it into an audio editor like Audacity (free from sourceforge.net) and split your stereo track to two mono tracks and re-sync with your video. To my knowledge, Soundbooth (Adobe's sound program for embed and replace stuff) doesn't have this capability, so you'll actually have to render and replace into soundbooth, save your audio files as .wavs, and then open them in a different audio NLE like Audacity.

That option gives you the most flexibility. You can also apply audio effects to your audio track in the timeline called "fill left" or "fill right" which will help to get you closer to your centered audio for each channel. However, it's not perfect and has proven to me to be frustrating to use. My standard workflow now is to ALWAYS source my audio tracks as separate mono tracks whenever I drop them into the timeline and I can then place them wherever I'd like within the stereo or surround image.