XL1-3 audio channels into Premiere 6.5
 

A friend of mine just wrapped a week of shooting insurance company seminars destined for CD. His XL1 was set up to record three channels of 12 bit audio. He uses an old Matrox board and captures analogue, with some magic to collect all three tracks. He needs help editing the volume of tape in a timely fashion and asked me to provide it. I can certainly capture through my VX2000, and have sorted out two audio tracks on my own projects (courtesy of a Beachtek box) but I'm not sure I'd be able to get all three from DV tape in Premiere 6.5. Can I do it and if so how? If not, I'm passing up some useful money and I'm hoping this won't be one of those expensive lessons.

David Hurdon

What capture card and software are you using? You rneed one with drivers that support 4-channel capture. Then you can toss the channel without audio on it. You will find threads here that speak to third party software that supports 4-channel capture.

Premiere (like most NLE softwares) only support 2 channels capture. However, you can use Scenalyzer (nice cheap software that capture 4 channels) to capture your clips and and then importing these clips into Premiere for editing.

Thank you both for your replies. I've downloaded a trial of Scenalyzer and rummaged through the old threads as suggested. SC admits to not running well on some systems, without many hard and fast predictors - in other words, try it and hope it works. Are there any similar alternatives if I find I'm one of those for whom it won't work well? I'm testing it today on footage from the event, and would like to give him some reason to keep an open mind about my doing the work if SCLive isn't it for me.

David Hurdon

I may have discovered an alternative myself. The Raptor Edit software that came with my DV Raptor several years ago has a setting for "capture audio from track 3 and 4". Elsewhere I found claims from 1999 and a review from 2000 that Rap Edit does support 4-channel audio capture. I'll let the group know, unless someone chimes in before my experiment.

David Hurdon

YES! Raptor Edit will import tracks 3 and 4 as a separate wav file as it imports video and tracks 1 and 2 in AVI format. Both can be imported to Premiere and edited as usual. Now I know why I paid $600 CDN three years ago for a DV Raptor! It just more than paid for itself on this one job, which I've got now that I've shown him the capture and results.

David Hurdon