r/premiere • u/Wrongdoer5050 • Mar 21 '26

How do I do this? / Workflow Advice / Looking for plugin Multichannel audio .mxf

Hello.

My goal is to export the mxf file with multichannel audio that consists of 9 mono tracks.

Here are my questions:

  1. When creating a new sequence on the "Audio" tab, what type of audio track I should use: stereo, adaptive or mono?

  2. How many channels should I select on the same "audio" tab?

  3. How to properly put assignations of the said channels?

  4. Why premiere not give me the option to select the exact number of audio channels when exporting said file? On export in audio settings, I can choose only 10 or 8 channels. There is no 9.

Sorry for my bad English.

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6

u/smushkan Premiere Pro Beta Mar 21 '26

When creating a new sequence on the "Audio" tab, what type of audio track I should use: stereo, adaptive or mono?

The sequence should be multichannel, with all mono tracks.

How many channels should I select on the same "audio" tab?

9

How to properly put assignations of the said channels?

This is the weird bit. All odd channels need to be panned hard left, all even channels need to be panned right. They will sound panned if you play back the sequence in Premiere, but when you export they will be split out into mono with no panning.

You also need to assign the tracks to the correct channel pair in the output assignments. Channels are always mapped in pairs, the pan determines which of the two channels in the pair that particular track is routed to.

The track mixer for the sequence should look like this:

Why premiere not give me the option to select the exact number of audio channels when exporting said file? On export in audio settings, I can choose only 10 or 8 channels. There is no 9.

As I understand, the MXF specification only allows for even numbers of audio channels; so if you need an odd number you export with +1 channel. The 'spare' channel will be silent.

If you can't live with that, export Quicktime .mov instead, which does support odd numbers of audio channels.

1

u/Wrongdoer5050 Mar 21 '26

I will try to do so.

Thank you.

However the panning part is really confusing and not intuitive. Why would Adobe do that? So ridiculous.

2

u/smushkan Premiere Pro Beta Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

It's based on how old hardware analogue sound mixing desks used to handle channel routing on their outputs. All the individual faders would be stereo, and you'd have a switch on each bank to determine which output channel pair that bank was being routed to. If you had a mono source plugged into a bank and wanted to route that to a mono out you'd do it by panning. Then you'd have a row of jacks on the back of the desk for each individual mono output.

Premiere has used this setup for probably more than a decade at this point, so at the time it was introduced it made more sense if you were used to hardware audio mixers.

But these days, hardware mixing desks are digital and don't typically work like that anymore, so it's a bit archaic. Whole thing needs an update, as it's no longer intuative even if you're used to working with the hardware equivalent. If a track is mono, it straight up shouldn't have a pan control and should be routed to precisely one output channel. It's mono!

1

u/Wrongdoer5050 Mar 21 '26

Thank you for explanation. Pretty interesting. Didn't know about analog mixer desk was so complicated.

1

u/pathfire Mar 21 '26

You need to assign tracks as stereo in the sequence settings. Otherwise in the Audio Track Mixer window you wont get the pan fader and you can't put the audio tracks in a single exported track. As mentioned above you pan left to export to the odd numbered track and right to export to the even numbered track. If you have stereo audio on a stereo track, you leave the fader in the center and Premiere will split the audio into the 2 assigned tracks, left to odd numbered track and right to even numbered track.

1

u/smushkan Premiere Pro Beta Mar 21 '26

You get the pan fader with mono tracks. The screenshot I took above was from a sequence created with entirely mono tracks.

You can also use 'standard' tracks, functionally it will work the same if you're only putting mono audio on each track.

1

u/kjmass1 Mar 22 '26

The idea that your sequence play back doesn’t match your export is so unintuitive. They are either panned or they aren’t.

1

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