Swapping left-right channels on AVI files

Hi

What's the difference betweek Adobe Premier Pro v 2.0 and Adobe Premier Elements 2.0?

I just tried Adobe Premier Pro v 2.0 and it is very hard to use and might not even encode the file in the same format/codec during output as it was during input.

Regards,
Brian.

Premiere Pro is a program for professional video editors and Premiere Elements is more for the casual home editor who wants a pretty powerful video editing progam. It is easier to use, costs about $600 less than Premiere Pro, yet it retains much of the power of Premiere Pro.

How is your .avi file encoded?

Hi yukele,

Ok lets assume it is encoded using DivX. Thanks for the explanation re Premier Pro. I shall uninstall it now then.

Ok back to Premier Elements, how do you 'export' a file as avi? under my export button I only see Windows media, quicktime and mpeg.

Actually do I really have to use Adobe Premier Elements just to 'swap' left-right channels? Isn't there an easier and faster way to do this which takes less steps?

Thanks.

Regards,
Brian.

It looks like Premiere is not the best program for this project. It can be done with Premiere and many other popular editing programs, but they wil usually require you to re-encode the entire video just to change the sound, and we want to avoid that because it is a waste of time and it will degrade the quality of the video.

I think the best way to it would be with the freeware video processing program VirtualDub, and freeware audio editor Audacity. I know you wanted to do it with only one program, but I think this way will be the quickest, and the video stream will not be re-encoded.

Get VirtualDub here:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/virtualdub/VirtualDub-1.6.15.zip?download

and Audacity here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/

The procedure may look a bit long and complex, but it is much simpler than it looks:

Open you video in VirtualDub, and followe these directions to save the audio as a separate .WAV file:

http://www.dvdhelp.us/index.html?html/tutvirtualdub.html~mainFrame

Now open this WAV file in Audacity. You will now see the waveform of a stereo track in Audacity. At the left edge of this track is the name of the track with an arrow. Press the arrow, and in the pop-up menu, choose split stereo track.

Now you should have two mono tracks. Bring up the pop-up menu of the top track and select "Move Track Down", then select "Make Stereo Track". Now you have reversed the right and left and channels of your audio.

Go to File > Export as Wav and save the switched audio as a WAV file.

Now go back into VirtualDub and attach the new audio to the video:

http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/virtualdub_procedures.htm

That's it!

Hope this helps

I forgat to add, you should probably make a copy of the original video before doing anything, in case something goes wrong.

Hi yukele,

When I try to use the VirtualDub software to open the AVI file I get an error such as in the pic below:

http://flypicture.com/bin/?id=r9z2kKzR

I can't open divx files with that to extract the audio streams?

Thanks.

That's interesting. do you have the DivX codec installed?

Hi yukele,

yup, otherwise the playback will not be possible at all will it? :)

Thanks.

Hey guys,

anyone else with interesting ideas to try out?

yup it would be better if there is a solution to convert a few hundred .avi files at once to swap all its channels.

Thanks guys.

Perhaps someone at www.videohelp.com can help you out

ok i'll try that thanks.