In this tutorial, we'll explore channel configuration. I'll explain what a channel configuration is. We'll learn how to listen for the issue, and then how to modify a clip's channel configuration. During professional video production, more than one microphone is often used. Sometimes, it's a boom mic. Sometimes a lavalier or lapel mic. We do this because dedicated microphones usually produce better audio quality than the on-board microphones built into cameras. However, recording with an external mic plugged into a camera often results in both microphone's audio being recorded into the video file. The result is that you hear one microphone in one channel and the other microphone in the second channel. Let's listen to an example. Open project 301, channel configuration from the Module 3 keyword collection in the projects event. There's just one clip for demonstration. Play the clip and listen to it very carefully. Headphones will help you on this one. You should hear two different recordings of Anne. One in each channel or in each ear, if you're wearing headphones. If you're going to tell a story about them, you really have to delve into them to really understand why they're significant to you, and then to convey that to other people. If this is your first time listening for this type of issue, it may not be obvious. We'll isolate each channel in just a moment. Two microphones were used to record this clip. Unfortunately, you can see the lapel mic in this recording on Anne's shirt. We want to remove the on-board microphone audio and just use the audio recorded by the lapel mic. With the clips selected, I'm going to open the audio inspector. If the audio inspector isn't visible, click the inspector button, and then click the speaker icon for the audio inspector. Now, look down at the bottom where it says, "Audio configuration." You can see that the clip is set to a stereo configuration. Stereo isn't bad, in fact, it's the most common configuration for music, but you don't want to use stereo if you know that two microphones were used when recording. I'll click where it says "stereo," and change it to dual mono. This fixes one problem and causes another. If I leave it like this and play back the clip. If you're going to tell a story about them, you really have to delve into them. It will no longer sound different in each ear. Both channels sound the same, but it still sounds distorted. There's a lot of background noise, and Anne's voice sounds a little bit tinny. What's happening is that both microphone channels are playing evenly out of both output channels. I want to remove the bad channel. How do I know which is the bad channel? Now, that we've converted the clip to dual mono, each channel is broken out into separate waveforms below the merged waveform. I can put my schemer over dialogue 1 and just listen to that channel, and then do the same with dialogue 2. Let's listen to both. Here's dialogue 1. If you're going to tell a story about them, you really have to delve into them to really understand why they're significant to you. Let's hover over dialogue 2, and click play. If you're going to tell the story about them, you really have to delve into them to really understand why they're significant to you. It's obvious the dialogue 2 audio channel is much better than the dialogue 1 channel. So I'll uncheck dialogue 1, and we see that it dims. You may have missed it, but even in the timeline the waveforms shrank a little bit, because we removed one of the two channels of audio. Now, when I play the clip back in the timeline. If you're going to tell the story about them, you really have to delve into them to really understand why they're significant to you. It sounds much improved. Here's a tip to speed up this process. If you had had a very long interview with Anne, and you pulled 17 soundbites from her throughout your project, you wouldn't want to have to select each instance of soundbite from Anne and change the audio configuration. The good news is that you can change the audio configuration before you begin editing right after importing a clip. I'm going to right-click on this clip and choose reveal in browser, which will locate the original master clip from my library. Forget for a moment that we changed the channel configuration of the clip in the timeline. If we hadn't even started editing, we could go to the original master clip, which might be very long, and we might be taking many soundbites from it. We can open the audio inspector and make our change to dual mono, and turn off the bad channel. Now, when I begin editing, selections from the interview clip are already fixed when I add them to the timeline. I wouldn't have to do any work in the timeline at all. It's much better to correct the audio in the event before you get started rather than after you've built a complex timeline. In this tutorial, we explained the concept of a channel configuration. We listen for the sound issue and learn how to modify a clip's configuration. Next, we're going to tackle the basic concepts of audio mixing.
