Dual mono for XDCAM export

I have 261 clips (about 10 hours) of DVCPRO HD 1080i60 footage, and another house needs them on XDCAM, with timecode intact. So I can converted to XDCAM 1080i60 using Compressor. If I do, the video is fine, but the audio needs to be 16 bit mono tracks. Stereo doesn't work.

I'm using the PDW-U1 XDCAM USB drive.

Is there a way of having Compressor compress each channel individually as a mono track? Setting the audio to mono simply compresses everything to one track, which is useless for this.

If the timecode wasn't necessary, I know I can simply drop it in a timeline, and change the sequence settings Audio Outputs to dual mono. But that would take forever to manually change the sequence starting timecode to match the timecode of the clip.

Any ideas on how to most efficiently get these in the right format to export to XDCAM?
Thanks.

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and introducing-
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Ok... 1 small step here, not a solution in any way.

If you make a multiclip sequence from each clip, it will automatically fill in the timecode for you. And then you just have to do the Audio Output thing, and then export. Cuts out an error prone step.

Another small step, might help others.

Make a new Audio Output Preset in User Preferences, and then make a multiclip sequence. It should be ready to export as is.

Ok this is a bit naive perhaps, but I thought that the stereo status was just a flag within FCP. When you export to the XDCam disk does it care if Channels 1 and 2 have stereo relationship, or does it just treat them as two discrete audio streams?

When you export to the XDCam disk does it care if Channels 1 and 2 have stereo relationship


It does care Vince, yes. The Export plugin won't do its thing if the source for export is flagged a stereo.

Thanks Andy. Seems like an unnecessary PITA.

-V

Yes, it really is a PITA.

Question- does Avid do this better? I'm sending these to an Avid guy and he was just astounded that I couldn't simply put the files on the discs and send them to him, that it had to be in a certain format, which Final Cut doesn't make it easy to put it in.

For the record, the process I came up with wasn't as bad as I suspected. I compressed all the clips to XDCAM format using Compressor. Then I brought them in to FCP. I set up a new Audio Output Preset with Dual Mono Output and selected that as default. Then, I set a shortcut for making a new multiclip sequence, and made a Sparks macro so when I hit CMD-OPT-X, it would invoke the other shortcut, and then hit enter. Basically, select the clip, and with one keystroke you have a sequence ready to export to XDCAM - starting at the same TC as the clip, and with the right audio outputs. I was able to make 261 sequences with the correct settings in a mere hour.

I'm just glad I figured out the multiclip sequence hack - otherwise I would have been copy/pasting timecode for the next week.

Question- does Avid do this better?

This ones not an FCP thing James, its a Sony thing. Glad you got it all sorted.
Andy

I sent this thread to a friend of mine, as he has XDCam Disk recorders, and I thought he might run into the same problem down the line.

He explained something to me about why Sony might be doing this. XDCam is a long GOP format that is related to the MPEG2 family of codecs. MPEG2 allows for a couple of different ways to combine audio channels for efficient compression. If you flag the audio as stereo it is possible to look at both channels and not encode information in one channel that is also present in the other.

With field recordings, or other places where you have material that has no correlation the channels get encoded as discreet streams. That may be why Sony is forcing you to set the flag to mono.

-Vance