I haven't gotten this far yet, but it won't be long.

Pinnacle Studio 8 does not seem to have any L vs. R channel editing capability. My Screenblast demo invokes a separate sound program like SoundForge. I pointed Screeblast to my Cool Edit 200 installation, but when I right-clicked on the audio and sent it to Cool Edit, it didn't work. It appeared that Cool Edit tried to take the whole .avi and interpret it as sound.

Do higher end programs like Vegas and Premier allow direct editing of channels independently, or do they also invoke other programs?

Vegas definitely does, I can't speak for Premiere. Vegas is known
for its very high audio support and tools. In most programs you
can at least pan.

What you can do in your case (I assume PS8 lets you do this) is
export a stereo WAV or PCM file and load that up into Cool Edit.
Do the seperation there and export mono tracks back for import
into PS8.

I haven't looked to much into Vegas audio yet, but you can at
least load the file twice and simpy make one channel only the
left and the other channel only the right. I'm not sure if you can
split a stereo channel into two seperate channels, but I wouldn't
be at all suprised if you can. Anyway, the other technique works
just as easily and fast.

I cut my teeth on Pinnacle Studio... that program is barely passable for video editing.

If you get on ebay or look around... B&H etc... you can often find an outdated video card bundled with Premiere 6.0 or 6.5... for around a hundred bucks. Do THAT! The difference is mind-blowing... it'll take you WEEKS just to explore the possibilities.

I have both Premiere and Vegas... both are great programs, but I'd say Vegas is more intuitive and as Rob pointed out it's made to work with Sonic Foundary's other great sound programs... Acid and Soundforge. So if you're going to learn a new approach to editing I'd lean towards Vegas. The benefit of Premiere is the plethora of "plug-ins" which can be added from 3rd party companies... The plug-ins available can do all sorts of fun and effective things with your footage.

Premiere (in stock form... no plug-ins) can still do a LOT with your video/audio... splitting tracks is NOTHING... you can do that AND tweak the tracks with EQ, filtering, seperate volume, pan, and all sorts of effects.

To do what you asked in Premiere you would 1) unlink video/audio 2) copy and paste audio track to new track 3) duplicate left in one track duplicate right in the new track. This little paragraph took WAY longer to read then it takes to do this.

Then you can do whatever you want with the now seperated tracks. Vegas is just as simple.

Thank you both.

I gather that a lot of you more professional types use supplemental equipment to obtain and mix your audio coverage, but since my adaptor sends my two inputs (mic / mic, mic / line, etc.) to the left and right channels of my GL2, I foresee needing to split the stereo frequently.

Vegas allows for all things you ask for and a lot more. So does Audition/Cool Edit.
In Screenblast, are you opening a copy rather than the audio/video interleaved? I thought Screenblast allows for copies to be opened rather than video as well. (Audio only)
Forge of course, allows for all of this as well too.
Splitting a stereo track to two separate mono tracks is a right click away.

The following comments are to be prefixed with "in my opinion..." I have no link with Pinnacle, I'm just a satisfied user passing on some ideas. I've used Liquid Edition for 15 months, and it has serverd me very well.

Vegas does have a reputation for handling audio particularly well, and if you have very demanding audio requirements it might be a good choice. However, it's not necessarily the best video editor around. As a Studio user, if you want a more powerful editing program, you should consider Pinnacle Liquid Edition. Here are a few reasons...

1) You can split audio tracks on the time-line, and apply basic EQ, panning and volume corrections. More advanced processing has to be done outside LE - at least in the current version. Since Pinnacle now own Steinberg, we're hoping the new version -see below- will have more powerful audio functions, or at least, proper integration with Wavelab etc.

2) LE is one of the most powerful, and most productive, editors around. Many of the people who use it compare it to Avid, a pro-broadcast NLE, rather than Premiere and Vegas. This is not so surprising since it is the same software as in Liquid Blue, Liquid Chrome and Liquid Silver, pro-broadcast editors used by the BBC, amongst others. The difference is that Liquid Edition only works on DV footage internally, (MPEG2 can be captured and converted to DV) and runs on a normal PC with no special hardware except a 1394 Firewire card.

3) LE is very stable. Whatever else people may say about Premiere, it is not a robust application! Even if LE does crash (it has happened to me once in the last 15 months), it saves your work several times a second, so you should never lose any changes.

4) There are some good discounts around at the moment. I think I've seen it bundled with Steinberg's Wavelab Essentials recently. The reason for the promotion is simple - there's a new version in beta testing at the moment, rumoured to be released in September. Pinnacle have previously been quite generous in their upgrade offers. E.g. In the UK, the move from v4.5 to v5.0 cost £50.

5) Although the LE interface is quite different from S8, so are the interfaces for Premier, Edius and Vegas. I don't think LE would be more difficult to learn than the others. Other users who have made the change say LE is very quick, once you are used to it.

6) There's no need to get rid of S8 either. Provided you uninstall it, then reinstall it after adding LE, the two will exist happily on the same machine.

7) There's a free trial version of LE on Pinnacle's web site. There's also a very active and helpful web-board community (http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read_forums.asp?WebboardID=14&SectionID=85&lng=1), where you'll find all the strengths and weaknesses discussed.

Whatever you go for, please post back here and let us know what you chose and how well it handles your audio.

Cheers
Mark @ Steam Age Pictures

Has anyone consistently produced 90 minute or so DVDs with audio sync intact with the video edited in any of these?

BTW, Mark, I see I could get Liquid Edition 5.5 for $149 at academic discount for which I quality. That's pretty attractive.

Hi Fred,
Yes, I have created two DVDs of 90 minutes each, with menus, using LE's DVD authoring, with no audio-sync problems. Some other users have posted audio-sync issues, but it seems to be either during editing, or when recording voice-overs.

The DVD-creation ought to be a big plus for LE. You do it directly from the time-line, and most of it works really well. However, there's a few frustrating glitches (maybe bugs, maybe just lack of design work) that can trip you up. Judging from the posts on the web-boards, about half of LE owners use the built-in DVD functions, and the rest export (either as DV or as MPEG2 "elementary streams") to another package such as DVD Workshop or DVD-Lab.

There is a review of Vegas 5 & its associated DVD program in last months Computer Video magazine (http://www.computervideo.co.uk/) which was generally complimentary. I can recommend their DVdoctor web forums (http://www.dvdoctor.net/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi) too.

Cheers
Mark

PS: If you go to the CV site, also check out the story about dual-layer DVD+R - seems like there are some teething problems!