confused about audio panning

i hadn't really thought about this too much before and then it struck me that i may be doing things wrong. on to my question:

if the audio is brought in from an audio program as a stereo mix, do i need to go into the audio mixer and pan a1 hard left and a2 hard right? how does this differ if i bring in two mono audio channels?

this kind of seems like a beginner question, but i hadn't really thought about it much until recent.

thanks in advance

If you import stereo audio, it'll appear as a stereo pair in FCP, and you don't need to do anything to it. In fact you can't pan it left or right. All you can do with a stereo clip is adjust the spread. If you digitized a stereo source and your capture settings were A1 + A2 instead of Stereo, then you can either pan the clips left and right and keep them separate, or you can select them and modify them to be a stereo pair (OPT + L), I believe is the shortcut.

Andy

Panning in FCP can be a little counter intuitive.

-1 is full normal stereo. 0 is fully centered. 1 is fully reversed with left into right and right into left.

Ian

you can tell if a clip is a stero pair by looking in the "Audio" column.

or, after you've cut it into the timeline, you can tell a stereo clip by the little green double triangles on the audio.

if it doesnt have those, then it's dual mono, and most likely both tracks wil play out the center.
you could open them and pan them, but a quicker way is just to make them stereo.
select, and OPTION L to Stereo-Link.

sometimes this will work in a batch, meaning you can select a whole timeline and Option L, but that;s mainly if you;ve captured the cl;ips as Ch1+Ch2

if they;re single track files, with a seperate file for left and right (like files used in ProTools) then they may NOT batch, and you have to do each one. :-(

nick