What are the standard multitrack audio input formats for video editors?
To our knowledge, there is no standard for this. Although, Mode 4 seems to be favored and is sometimes referred to as “canonical surround layout.” Mode 4: L R C Lfe Ls Rs Lt Rt Final Cut Pro has no support for surround mixing in the application itself, but Soundtrack does and there are ways of moving the audio back and forth between FCP and Soundtrack. In the case of an existing surround mix coming into FCP, we have limited support for monitoring through an audio interface. The layout that we support “natively” and expect to find as tagged in the QT movie is what is described above (minus the stereo mix channels 7 – 8). Sometimes the “Lt Rt” are encoded as Dolby Logic “matrix” encoded stereo — a pseudo-surround encoding that can still be played as a normal 2-ch stereo mix. Note that QuickTime supports about 17-different surround layouts, but also allows you to re-assign an audio device’s outputs to your preferred speaker set up.
