I'm struggling to get my head round what seems to be a rather restrictive multi-channel workflow in Adobe Audition (CC2015). I'm producing a multi-channel sound track for a film, which in this case is likely to end up as 5.1, but I'll also require stereo mixes. I also sometimes work in multi-channel formats other than the standard of 5.1 - so sometimes I produce compositions in 8-channels for example.
Audition seems to allow Master Outputs to be set up as mono, stereo or 5.1, when creating a new sequence. This can't be changed at a later point at all. With Master Outputs set to 5.1, individual tracks in the multitrack session have the surround sound panners in place of the stereo pan controls. Because of this, it seems to me very fiddly to produce a stereo mix from a project built in 5.1 - because really I would like to use traditional stereo panners when mixing in stereo (of course, you can assign sounds to the left and right speakers only with the surround panner, but the surround panner doesn't have the simplicity and ease of use of a traditional panner for stereo mixing, designed as it is for 5.1).
Also I have often begun 5.1 mixes by building my timeline first in stereo, before later "extruding" my stereo composition into a surround sound field.
Going further into the issue, I often like to make use of both stereo panners and surround sound panners within the same project, depending on where I want to place a sound in the multichannel field and what type of movements through space might be required. It seems to me you can only work with one or the other in a multitrack project, am I right?
The best compromise I can find at the moment involves setting up new sequences with stereo master outputs, but then setting up busses for L, R, C, Ls and Rs (if I were wanting to produce both stereo and 5.1 mixes). At the mix down stage I believe you can export each bus independently, so that's one way of getting a multichannel output (by exporting stems for each bus channel) exported from a stereo Multitrack project.
The setup of Audition seems to make these workflows from stereo - multichannel - stereo very difficult, and I wondered had anyone found ways of working around this? Also is this something likely to be addressed in future updates of the program? I worked for years in Logic Pro and this kind of workflow was easily achieved.