Premiere Pro CS6 Surround Sound Encoding

Hi everyone. First of all, I love Voukoder. It's such a good plugin. But for the life of me, I can't figure out how to encode my premiere pro cs6 project to correctly include surround sound.

I've setup the project for 5.1 sound properly: my master channel is in 5.1, all my audio channels are mapped properly, my audio plays from the correct channels both in the project preview and when I encode with premiere itself. But when I use Voukoder to encode my project in 5.1, all the channels are mixed up. The center channel audio comes out of the left surround speaker, the left surround tries to come out of the subwoofer, the LFE tries to come out of a different speaker, it's a mess. It doesn't matter in what order I arrange my audio tracks on the timeline, nor that the channel mapping is fine when I encode with premiere itself.

How does Voukoder determine the channel mapping? Doesn't it just get the information from Premiere? Why is the channel assignment correct when I encode with premiere but not with Voukoder?

Thanks for any help and insights!

Hi Vouk. Thanks for responding.

I saved the video you linked and imported it into premiere. Mapped the audio tracks to proper 5.1 surround and premiere played it perfectly. Then I exported it with Voukoder and AC-3 5.1 surround codec.

The resulting export had the following channel configuration:

Front left = Front left

Front centre = left surround

Front right = front right

Right surround = LFE

Left surround = Centre

LFE = right surround

So basically, LFE and Right Surround swapped channels, and Front Centre and Left Surround swapped channels. The rest played in their proper channels.

Yep, I only found out about Voukoder a few weeks ago. So I have version 7.2 installed.

I've been doing some digging. Does Voukoder use ffmpeg to do its work? Because I think the problem comes from that. ffmpeg's 5.1 channel configuration is

FL+FR+FC+LFE+LS+RS

whereas in premiere CS6 (I don't know about CC) the configuration seems to be

FL+FR+LS+RS+FC+LFE.

So that's why FC and LS, and LFE and RS, swap channels on export. ffmpeg expects the third channel to be FC whereas in premiere it's LS (so they swap); and the same with LFE and RS.

I exported in 5.1 using premiere then used ffmpeg to copy the file, then when I imported the new file back into premiere the channels had swapped again. So I guess there's a mismatch between what channel layout premiere cs6 uses and what layout ffmpeg uses.

I don't know how useful this is for you since you said you can't install CS6 anymore, but hopefully it's at least interesting!

Thanks Robert Niessner ! Yea, I'm starting to learn that's the case.

In case anyone finds this post looking for a solution, I think I've figured out a way to get 5.1 surround to export properly with Voukoder on CS6.

Basically, you want to fool CS6 into arranging your tracks in the standard layout of L+R+C+LFE+Ls+Rs. One way I've found to do that is to create your sequence with a 5.1 master audio and then have your audio tracks set to adaptive. In the audio mixer, you now need to have each track send its audio to the standard layout (which will conflict with premiere's layout, but when you export with Voukoder it'll be correct).

So have

all Front Left audio tracks output to 1

all Front Right audio tracks output to 2

all Front Center audio tracks output to 3 (this will make the audio come out of Left Surround channel on CS6, but again it'll come out of the correct Front Center channel when you export)

all LFE audio tracks output to 4 (audio will come out of Right Surround channel on CS6)

all Left Surround audio tracks output to 5 (audio will come out of Front Center channel on CS6)

all Right Surround audio tracks output to 6 (audio will come out of LFE channel on CS6)

And you're good to go! Of course, you can do all your editing in the regular CS6 layout or use Audition, then before you export rearrange the track outputs to the above layout.