Stereo sound in Premiere Pro explained

All right, so let's talk about Stereo sound. Stereo just means that there are left and right speakers. So when you put headphones on, some music comes out the left, and some comes out the right. You'll notice here, in the tracks that we've been using, you can see here, my microphone, this particular one, records the same on both channels. So even though it's a stereo track you can see L and R, left and right. If you can't see those you have to kind of just make it bigger so you can see them. So left channel and the right channel, both of this, music and this, are just using the same thing, so nothing really happening here. That's why you have two of them. 

You will get given stuff that is on these two, will be different. So have a little look at one. So I'm going to look in my 'Project' file, let's find, under 'Audio', let's have a look at the one called 'Sound 1'. Just double click it, we won't add it. You can see it here, my Source Window, and you can see, there's two tracks, left and right, but there's different things happening, at the beginning here it's on both sides, so both sides, but it will toggle between the two. So I'm going to start at the beginning here, hit 'Play'. Both tracks, you can't really hear this because you're listening… "…moving images." 

I can hear it on my headphones. So it's gone on my left track now, it's kind of really weird. It's on one side only, and then it's going to change to this right hand side. Beautiful. Cuts to either side. Really weird, you can see it down here, bouncing on just one side. Cool, so that is Stereo. You will get stuff that might-- we're going to talk about what to do with it if it's only on one channel, but just get the idea, Stereo sound means there is two separate channels. One on the left, one on the right. 

Most of the time there with microphones, they're both on both sides. Thank you to MasterStudy for this track. I borrowed it from his YouTube track. So check him out, MasterStudy,' he's got lots of cool stuff for testing speakers. There's a link in the links file as well, called Testing Speakers. Now there will be times where you get given, stuff that is separate on different tracks but still usable, is when you're using something like this, this is a stereo microphone for a video camera. Another stereo one. 

This one that I used, the NTG4+ is not stereo. It records it in and sticks it on to stereo tracks, but basically just duplicates it on to, there it is there, on to the exact same track, left and right. The nemesis of stereo is mono. Most things recorded in stereo, most, you will get some mono stuff as well. We'll cover that in this course as well. The reason we're going to talk about stereo and mono, is if you output the wrong one with just one channel. 

I was listening to a YouTube video the other day, and I plugged my headphones in, and I just put one of my earbuds in, do you do that? I listened to it, and then all of a sudden it disappeared, I was like, "Yeah." Mouse moving, and I mess around ages trying to turn the volume up and down, and mute, and restart the computer, turns out he had exported stuff to YouTube, with it all onto one side of the track. So it was only on kind of like the left and I had the right ear in. So you need to make sure that goes out on to both tracks, or at least know what you're doing when you're exporting stuff. Couldn't for the life of me find that one, but know that it can happen. 

Another thing before we go is I just wanted to show you this file, because it has these two tracks here. So one is in stereo, one is in mono. This just means when I recorded this particular screencast, it was from a microphone that only recorded mono. So there's no two channels, left and right are the same thing. There is no actual left and right, just mono, whereas this is recorded on a different microphone that has stereo recording, records under both channels, and in this case this particular mic, just records the same thing on to left and right. What does it mean for you? It will depend, if you have a final output that needs stereo, as in you're doing a film or a short documentary, or something that's going out to anything other than the Internet, you probably want stereo, not always. What we're going to do, is in a later video, I'll show you how to kind of smoosh it all together, so you get everything on to one channel, so it's the same on both ears, but for all intensive purposes, for the moment these two work just the same. 

So that's your crash course in stereo audio, and mono as well. Let's get into the next video.