Export file from Premiere with 7.1 audio or 5.1 using Voukoder plugin

    • Adobe Premiere / MediaEncoder
  • dcsimpson
    • #1

    Is there a way to export a video clip with 5.1 or 7.1 audio from Premiere using the Voukoder plugin? How do you map the audio channels?

    • #2

    Yes and if you google you're find lots of How-Tos on mapping the Audio input channels. Search for the words "Premiere Pro multichannel setup". The key is to create a multichannel sequence and then map the source channels accordingly. Export is very straight forward and Voukoder just picks up defined parameters and pushes it out correctly.

    • #3

    BTW, if your source is 5+ channels of mono and you're trying to get a top quality mix, I strongly suggest you do the edit/balance/mix in Audition and fold that back into Premiere.

    • #4

    Hey thanks so much for responding. To give better clarity into what I'm actually doing, I am digitizing films I own and editing them to be able to watch them with my children. Sometimes removing a scene here and some language there makes all the difference. So I am bringing the remux'ed versions of 4k blurays with the audio converted from DTS to PCM 7.1 for premiere to read it. With the extra 2 channels I suppose I could merge those into the left and and right surround channels tht already exist. My question though is normally in premiere for example if you exporting via quicktime and not using the voukoder plugin you can tell the export what order the tracks correspond to what channels like in the screenshot I attached, but you cannot do this once you select voukoder. So what channel mapping order is voukoder using? How do I know what I have as the center channel in my premiere timeline isn't going to the left channel for example in my final export?

    • #5

    I assumed that voukoder does a passthru to the audio encoder in some standardized way. What you show is NOT what I thought 5.1 is mapped as. What I've used and I confirmed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5.1_surround_sound for PCM audio is: L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs.

    As I wrote, Audition gives you great control on how you can map, merge, mix the channels but you can map it also in Premiere via Track Mixer with mapping of 1 - 6.

    But do you actually have a Surround theater sound system? If not then why complicate? Just downmix to Stereo. Again Audition has some nice methods to properly do it.

    We use 8 mics for the concerts I record. I can control how much I want a mic to mix/bleed with other channels. From that I can generate 5.1 or stereo.

    • #6

    I am able to correctly route and map channels in Premiere and audition, that really isn't the problem. The issue arises in how Voukoder assigns the channels upon export. After doing some extensive testing with exporting several different configurations I realized Voukoder no matter what exports the channel scheme as you mentioned above L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs. It does not matter how you arrange your tracks on the timeline Voukoder will export it this way. Perhaps this information will help some poor soul having the same issues I was having.

    But this works for me wonderfully now and sounds great on my surround sound system using Plex for playback. 2 small details to point out that may save someone the same headaches I had. In Premiere itself before you open the Voukoder tab make sure in the audio tab that audio is set to 5.1 as you mentioned above. And within Voukoder select AAC (FFMPEG) audio and within the options make sure you select "low complexity" I kept having problems when the profile was set to main or anything else but once I tried low complexity it worked like a charm.

    The other little detail is Premiere and Voukoder only allow a 5.1 export. So what do you do with a 7.1 mix? Well all I did was take those alternate left and right surround channels and routed them to the main left and right surround channels. I tested it out and it worked just fine. I could hear both mixed properly.

    • #7

    So do I understand that Voukoder always exports as L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs? If so then that makes sense as it's the 5.1 standard. So how do you connect/map in Premiere the appropriate input channels to the correct outputs? I screen grab pic would be great too :)