Various Sony and Panasonic videocams capture 5-channel sound.  Studio downmixes it to 2-channel or (in some cases with Studio 12.0) to monaural r-channel.  The channel fade and balance tools cannot create stereo from mono, and cannot really reconstruct 5-channel from 2-channel.  This deafeats the notion that Studio really supports any sort of 5 channel output, except perhaps ones the user devises for sound effect tricks.  This impairment should not be very hard to fix.  At the very least, Studio 12 should be patched to restore what Studio 11 did: downmix the Panasonic models' 5-channel to 2-channel, instead of to mono.   Of course, I would be delighted to learn that the 12.1 patch issued yesterday includes this, but I see no mention in the list of enhancements or fixes.  To be tested.

FYI - I have submitted a Feature Request into our tracking database to see if we can implement this in a future version of Studio. I definitely can't make any guarantees for our current development cycle, since we are close to when we release our upcoming 12.1 version. Hopefully it can be done soon thereafter.

Also thanks for the feedback I noticed in another forum thread that our 12.1 patch fixes a bug we had introduced with 12.0 where you were getting bad sound distribution after importing AC3. I'll try to find out what transpired, but as you say it's been fixed in the Beta patch we'll make sure not to allow such a regression to occur again.

I would just like to add my vote for this feature to be added.  I moved from Sony's Vegas to Pinnacle Studio but I really miss importing 5.1 which Vegas handled so well.  Thanks for submitting the Freture Request, it's great to see a company acting on customer feedback in this way.  As the original post was sometime ago could you let me know if there has been any progress?

No.

Pinnacle,

1080p camcorders that record dolby digital 5.1 are now common place. Please implement 5.1 audio capture in your future releases.

We don't want to downmix to stereo and then recreate 5.1.

All we want is what is on the camcorder, untampered with.

Please resolve, thanks

 Robin