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Premiere Pro

SimonHy

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OMF Export - Doubling tracks?

Jul 24, 2012 7:00 PM

Hi,

We've recently switched to Premiere and have just finished our first few projects. We've exported OMFs of the audio for sound mix in Pro Tools, which has mostly gone okay, but there has been a few little issues. We're quite new to Premiere so possibly something we're doing wrong.

- The resulting OMF has twice the number of audio channels as the Premiere project it's being exported from. All of the audio has been doubled up as well, so channel 2 is the same as channel 1, channel 4 is the same as 3 etc.

- For one of the projects we've exported, any clips that were slowed down have lost their audio in the OMF.

Neither of these are majors, but we have a variety of sound engineers that mix our programs, and some of them are not at the level I'd like (something I have no control over). I like to give them as straight forward a mix as possible rather than having extra audio and missing audio, so if there is something we can do to make this work better I'm happy to implement it.

We're using CS6, and have our default audio tracks set up as mono tracks, and the audio settings for both mono and stereo media set to use mono. Each track should just have a single audio channel to it, so I'm not sure where this doubling up is coming from.

Any suggestions?

934 Views 4 Replies Latest reply: SimonHy, Jul 24, 2012 10:06 PM

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1. Charles VW,

Jul 24, 2012 7:41 PM in reply to SimonHy

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The OMF format originally only supported mono clips on mono tracks (this was the same for Pro Tools a while back too). In CS6, Premiere changed such that mono clips could go on stereo tracks (it is unfortunately called "Standard" tracks in the UI) and stereo clips can go on mono tracks and so forth.

When we create an OMF file, we have to create mono tracks, so any stereo track is split into two. So if you had a stereo clip on a stereo track, the left channel would go on the first of the two tracks, and the right channel would go on the second of the two. However, if you have a mono clip on a stereo track, then the mono clip is first rendered through the stereo track's pipeline (minus any effects), and then split into two mono clips on adjacent tracks just as if it was originally a stereo clip.

I believe this is what you're seeing, so if you're always working with mono clips, you may first consider using mono audio tracks if you're going to be exchanging with Pro Tools.

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2. SimonHy,

Jul 24, 2012 8:05 PM in reply to Charles VW

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Ahhh, that makes sense. We've been working entirely using "standard" tracks, as they work more like audio in Avid and Final Cut, which is what we're used to. Thanks.

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3. Charles VW,

Jul 24, 2012 9:27 PM in reply to SimonHy

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Curious, Final Cut Pro 7 also only allowed for mono clips on mono tracks. They "simulated" stereo by having linked stereo clips on adjacent tracks, with a really funky inverse panner. So I'm surprised ot hear you say that the Standard tracks are more like FCP (or did you mean FCPX)?

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4. SimonHy,

Jul 24, 2012 10:06 PM in reply to Charles VW

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FCP7. I mean that they're more like standard tracks in that it doesn't matter what type of media you put on them, each channel just gets a track (well... after you've set stereo media to import as mono in Premiere). When I first tried out CS5.5, the whole different-types-of-audio tracks thing threw me. Especially because very little of the audio I use is in stereo, but stupidly some of the cameras we use insist on regarding their two channels as "left and right" when in fact they're usually boom and radio or camera mic.

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