Powerful New Features

Premiere Pro 2.0 offers two excellent new audio features that you'll see used throughout the book: Source Channel Mappings and Extract Audio. Both of these new features are the type of forward thinking, workflow-oriented tools that make 2.0 superior to 1.5. Because of this, it is more powerful to teach them within the boundaries of a workflow. To preview their power, however, take a quick look at each now.

Source Channel Mappings

Say you capture a clip of an interview that has two channels of audio (Stereo). On one channel, the left, the audio was recorded from the microphone on your camera (ambient). On the other channel, the right, the audio was recorded with a directional microphone recording the subject of the interview. When you work with the clip, instead of having the audio for the clip appear as a single stereo file with both channels on one stereo track, you can use the Source Channel Mappings feature to remap the audio of the clip to display in the timeline as two separate mono clips linked to the original file. This feature remaps the audio of the file so that the clip looks and acts exactly the same in the Project panel; when you add the clip to the timeline, however, it uses two mono tracks to display the remapped stereo audio. You will work with Source Channel Mappings in Chapter 27, "Advanced Editing: The New Multi-Cam Workflow."

Extract Audio

If you want to use the audio only of a clip and none of the video, or you want to use a section of audio only and not the video, you can now extract the audio from your audio and video clip so that in your Project panel you have a unique audio clip instance that is audio only with no video. This feature is very useful when you want to speed up the pace of your workflow so that you don't have to open the file in the Source Monitor and turn off the video of the file to use the audio only in the timeline. You will use Extract Audio in Chapter 16, "Custom DVD Design."