Editor Jonny Elwyn shares his workflow for audio exports in Adobe Premiere Pro
Exporting multi-channel audio stems helps you deliver master files, archive projects and keep your editorial options open when re-editing the files in the future.
The process is quite simple, but there are a few hoops to jump through depending on where you’re starting from and how complex your timeline is.
In this Insight, I’ll walk you through each step and share a handful of audio channel-related tips and tricks along the way.
Why Split Tracks Are So Useful
Exporting multi-channel audio stems (also called split-tracks) from Adobe Premiere Pro is a useful skill to master. It is standard practice when delivering master files and a good idea for creating archival masters.
If you only export the standard stereo mix, all the elements of your sound design (dialogue, music, effects, etc.) will be baked into one file.
With split tracks, each audio stem (Dialog/Music/Effects) is contained in its own audio channel in the final file.
This means you do several useful things – at a later time:
A Quick Note About Terms:
I’ll try to be consistent with my terms:
One of Premiere’s quirks is that when you set up a Sequence, it refers to ‘normal’ audio channels as ‘standard’ tracks. But these can contain either stereo or mono audio sources. If you want to add Stereo tracks, then choose ‘Standard’.
In Premiere Pro, you can create five different audio Track Types: Standard, Mono, Stereo, Adaptive, and 5.1. In this Insight, we will focus on Standard. If you need to work with 5.1 stems, you can also follow this workflow.
Step-by-step: Exporting Multi-Channel Audio in Premiere Pro
These are the stages to the basic workflow:
- Prep a multi-channel timeline. It can have as many tracks as necessary.
- Patch your audio tracks into the audio layout of your final export in a new timeline.
- Paste your timeline into the new timeline with the tracks properly patched.
- Export your split tracks/stems.
- Verify your export.
The chances are you haven’t been editing in a timeline already set up for your final multi-channel export. You’ve been too busy moving things around, adding tracks as needed, and doing important creative work.
Now that you’re ready to export a multi-channel file, it’s much simpler to create a new timeline to handle the number of tracks you are working with and the number of audio channels you want in your final file rather than trying to adjust your existing timeline.
For example, in your timeline, you might have 6 tracks for dialogue and 11 for sound effects, but in your final exported file, you only want separate stereo channels for dialogue, music, and effects. In this case, all of the individual source tracks are patched (mapped) to their appropriate output channels, where they will be mixed on export.
Of course, you can create as many individual audio channels in your export as you like, for example, if you want a discrete audio channel per dialogue track or speaker.
Step 1. Prep a Multi-Channel Timeline
In my original editing timeline (above), you can see that I have 5 standard stereo audio tracks, labeled by stem: Dialogue, Music, and Effects.
I’m going to export that as 8 tracks of stereo (1 x L/R audio channels per stem) into four groups:
In this example, the multi-channel export will mix my two original sound effects tracks into one stereo channel.
I’m exporting two dialogue tracks as separate channels to show you a hack for delivering multiple audio versions of your edit in a single render!
Organise Your Timeline
Rename your audio tracks: Right-click on each track name, e.g., Audio 1, and choose Rename.
Tip: If Rename is greyed out, enlarge your audio track heights until the default name (Audio 1) appears. Now right-click again, and Rename will be available.
Tidy up your audio layout to keep the same stems (D/M/E) isolated to the same tracks, making your audio channel patching easier in the next step.
Tip: Color coding your audio files by stem makes this much faster to double-check visually.
Create a New Multi-Channel Timeline
Option 1: File > New Sequence
This will load the New Sequence settings window. Choose a sequence preset that suits your video aspect ratio, codec, resolution, etc, and then click on the Tracks tab.
In this example, the preset has 4 standard audio tracks, all patched to a single stereo mix.
Option 2: Load from Sequence (preferred)
Instead of building a track layout from scratch, click ‘Load from sequence’ and choose your original editing timeline! This is my preferred option since it guarantees my track layout matches precisely the original timeline – when we do our copy-paste operation.
As you can see above, this has brought in my track layout and naming.
But, there are several items we need to change before pressing OK:
Select Multichannel from the Mix dropdown and 8 for the Number of Channels (or however many you need for your project).
Step 2. Patch Your Audio Channels
Next, we must assign which source tracks will be patched (mapped) to which output channels.
Luckily, this tick-box exercise is done within the New Sequence dialog box.
Click the Output Assignments button for the track you want to patch, and the Track Output Channel Assignments window will appear. Everything is patched to channels 1-2 by default, so you must uncheck this box for every other assignment.
For example, I am patching the audio track ‘Dialogue 2’ in the image above to output channels 3-4.
Go through each track and assign it to each output channel.
As far as I know, there is no way to label the mix output channels to keep your mapping organized, nor is there a way to do so in the exported audio file itself. So, if you’re exporting something complex, you might want to create a crib sheet for your audio patching layout.
Optional: Save a multi-channel preset
Once your patching is complete, you can save a reusable timeline preset by clicking ‘Save Preset’, naming it, and adding a helpful description to remind yourself how it’s set up.
These presets will be available in the Custom folder of the Sequence Presets tab in the New Sequence window, as above.
Step 3: Copy and paste your edit
This step is easy: After saving the new multi-channel timeline, copy and paste your entire original edit into this new multi-channel timeline. Since you created the multi-channel timeline by using ‘Load from Sequence,’ the audio tracks will match up exactly.
Now, it’s time to export the multi-channel file.
Step 4: Export Multi-Channel Audio from Premiere Pro
In the Export settings, choose a format that supports multi-channel audio export. For Premiere Pro, this is either Quicktime or MXF OP1a.
In this example, I’ve chosen QuickTime, as it allows you to create multiple stereo output channels in the final exported file – just as we’ve set up in our channel patching.
If you chose MXF OP1a, you can export 8 channels of interleaved mono audio.
If you chose DNxHR/DNxHD MXF OP1a, you can select ‘Separate mono tracks’ to create separated mono tracks in the MXF.
In the Audio Settings More… section, click the + icon to add as many audio channels as you need, and change each dropdown menu to stereo.
This will match our source patching. To save an export preset of your multi-channel export settings, click the … icon to the right of the Preset dropdown menu, and choose ‘Save preset.’
Now, export your file!
Step 5: Verify your Multi-Channel Audio File
Import your exported file. Right click and choose ‘New Sequence from Clip’ to make a new timeline that matches the file’s settings.
As you can see, we have our four stems (dialogue one, dialogue two, sound effects, and music) as separate stereo audio channels.
Bonus: My Multi-Channel Hack (for hacking multi-channel files)
Let’s say you had multiple language versions of the same edit with English voice-over in channels 1-2 (Dialogue one in our example) and Spanish in Dialogue 2 (channels 3-4).
You’ll save on export time by exporting them both together in one render. This useful trick also lets you delete the language audio channel you don’t need, as in the “before and after” image above.
How?
Using a free app called Multi-Track Maker.
Multi-Track Maker allows you to open your multi-channel video/audio file, delete or adjust any audio channels, hit save, and have zero rendering time.
I used to do this trick in QuickTime 7 Pro, but that no longer runs on modern Mac OS.
Open a duplicate of your exported file with MTM, and delete the language track you don’t need from each one. In our example, this is in track 3. Track 1 is the video and track 6 is the timecode.
One really useful thing you used to be able to do in QT7 was open a separate audio file and copy and paste those tracks into another QuickTime file of the same length. This was a great way to update your audio mix in an exported video file without having to re-render the whole thing.
Let me know if you’ve figured out how to do this today!
External Links
Related Mixing Light Insights
What’s your multi-channel audio workflow?
Hit the comments with your approach to creating multi-channel audio in Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve and whether you’ve discovered any other useful workflow hacks.
– Jonny
