Choosing audio channels
Premiere Pro has advanced audio management features. You can create complex sound mixes
and selectively target output audio channels with original clip audio. You can work with
mono, stereo, 5.1, Ambisonics, and even 32-channel sequences and clips with precise control
over the routing of audio channels.
If you’re just starting out, you’ll probably want to produce sequences mastered in stereo using
mono or stereo source clips. In this case, the default settings are most likely what you need.
When recording audio with a professional camera, it’s common to have one microphone record
onto one audio channel and a different microphone record onto another audio channel. These are
the same audio channels that would be used for regular stereo audio, but they now contain
completely separate sound.
Your camera adds metadata to the audio to tell Premiere Pro whether the sound is meant to be
mono (separate audio channels) or stereo (channel 1 audio and channel 2 audio combined to
produce the complete stereo mix).
What is an audio channel?
When an audio recording is created, it’s always captured and stored as one or more audio
channels. Think of a channel as a single signal—something you could hear with one ear.
Because we have two ears, we are able to hear in stereo—sensing where a sound comes
from by comparing differences in the way the sound arrives at each ear. The process
happens automatically and precognitively (your conscious mind doesn’t do any analysis to
sense where a sound comes from).
To capture stereo (the sound two ears can detect), you need two signals, so two channels
are recorded.
One signal (let’s say the sound a microphone captures) becomes one channel in an audio
recording. For output, one channel will play through one speaker or headphone ear. The
more channels you have for recording, the more sources you can capture independently
(think of capturing an entire orchestra with many channels to be able to adjust the volume
of each instrument separately in post-production).
To play audio with different volume levels on multiple speakers (for surround sound, for
example), you need multiple playback channels. You’ll learn more about working with
audio in Lesson 10, “Editing and Mixing Audio.”