How to efficiently remove one audio channel in mpeg2 video?

Question

Situation: thirteen 700mb 1hr long mpeg2 videos with 2 audio channels. Only left channel contains corresponding audio, right channel contains nothing but barely hearable static noise. How do I get rid of it and make it mono?

Answer 1

If you go for a professional video suite such as Premier, then this is very straightforward, however if your budget won't stretch that far you can do it in three steps:

AviDeMux or FFMpeg will let you split audio from video.

Once you have the audio separated from the video this is easily done in any DAW by simply splitting the left and right into two channels. For Cubase:

• Import your audio
• Set your left and right locators, export audio
• In Channels select Stereo Split.
• Check "Import to Audio Track"

Cubase will then bring in left and right as two separate tracks.

Delete the right one, then set that remaining channel to be exported as mono.

Then use AviDeMux or FFMpeg to combine the audio and video tracks again.