friend has a mbox problem

[jnewry]

SO, my friend has a mbox mini and was trying to make a movie in iMovie 09 using his mic. So he changes his audio input to the mbox mini and then changes his input in iMovie to the mbox also. He goes to record the video and everytime he plays it back he only gets mono output from the recording. Everything is panned left. Now in essence this makes sense due to him only using track 1 from his mbox which is mono... but I used to use my mbox all the time for this and I never had this problem. The mono channel would convert to stereo after I recorded it.. any help???

Thanks in advance

[GeoffLee]

It's not an mbox problem. I can't help with your friends imovie issue, but when you record a track in protools with a single input it is not converted to 'stereo'. It's still mono but panned to the middle, which means the audio is allocated to both sides equally.

It looks imovie only wants to record in stereo. Input 1 on the mbox will be routed to left and input 2 to the right. A quick and dirty solution is to use 2 mics with the capsules as close together as possible to avoid phasing.

[jbasil]

If he's only recording with one track, so it will not be stereo, and you need for it to playback in both sides. I'm assuming, like Geoff is, that iMovie is only allowing you to record both sides but he's only inputting audio to one? If you import it into PTools you'll see if it's a stereo file with only one side of audio. If so, you could also create two new mono tracks, drag that audio onto both and pan one L and the other R.

[The Dougfather]

Unless you need to be recording in iMovie, i.e. if it's a voice over or the like, export the movie from iMovie and take it in to Pro Tools, do what you need to do then export out the audio and drop it back in the iMovie timeline.

Even the voiceover feature in Final Cut is a PIA.