Welcome to Tool Tip Tuesday for Adobe Premiere Pro on ProVideo Coalition

I was working with a skilled editor last week and then saw something painful. Watching them fight with the audio tracks.

They dragged the footage to the timeline. Then turned off linking. Deleted the unused audio tracks. Moved the remaining audio up. Then turned linking on.

There was a painful moment when I asked, “You know there’s a way to modify your audio channels beforehand, and never have to do that, right?”

Here’s what I showed them.

Modify Audio Channels.

So, you just imported a clip.

And it’s Stereo – despite it being really a boom and a lav. And we don’t need the Lav.

Worse than the above example, if you bring this to the timeline as-is, you get one clip where both audio channels are treated as a single object – you can’t adjust left and right independently. (Bonus points if you know the “breakout to mono” command.)

Let’s convert the clip to just the audio tracks you’ll need.

Right-click the clip in your Project panel and choose Modify > Audio Channels.

Let’s say you’re looking at a stereo file that really should be two separate mono clips.

Here’s the fix: change the Clip Channel Format from Stereo to Mono.

Want two tracks? Type “2” in the Number of Audio Clips field. This tells Premiere you want two separate mono clips instead of one stereo pair.

Just need one? Adobe makes this easy with the “Mono” preset at the top of the dialog. One preset splits your stereo file into individual mono tracks.

Custom Channel Configurations

Need something more specific? Perhaps you only need the second channel of an imported file, or you’re working with multichannel audio where only specific tracks are relevant. Make your customizations, then click the save icon to build and have your own preset.

Now, when you bring the clip to your timeline, it arrives exactly how you need it – no more post-import cleanup.

This series is courtesy of Adobe.