Will,
I did some experimenting today, trying to replace JUST THE ADUIO of a clip with audio that was tweaked in another program (cubase) I finally got it to work in PP.
So I have a video source file with audio. I want to manipulate the audio in cubase, but I dont want to wait for the edit to be done in PP (or say the edit IS done and you want to fix the audio for the entire asset as you use bits and pieces of it here and there in your timeline)
One option, is to use the Offline and Re-Link method. Set the asset to offline, make your tweaks to a copy of the original asset, update the audio and render the new asset. Not optimal as you have to create new video just to get audio. (the reverse is true if you wanted to bring in updated video from AE for example)
My goal is to update just the audio, or just the video of a PP clip, AFTER it has been edited on the time line, I don't want to manually line up a "tweaked" audio track with the existing VIDEO audio track.. Turns out to be rather simple.
In PP i have already imported the original video with audio asset. (a cineform avi)
I add it to a timeline, tweak the end points, do some edits etc.
Now I want to use cubase to modify the audio of that asset, so I do just that. Open the original cine form avi file as a track in a cubase project, tweak the audio, gates, noise suppression or what ever, and finally export a .wav file of the update audio.
Now back in PP, I import the new .wav file. Shift + Alt Click on the .wav file, and drag it over and drop it on the edited clip on the timeline.. thats it. The audio for the clip on the time line is now the audio I edited in cubase, its start \ end times are the same as the one on the time line, etc. I can extend, shorten the clip etc.
The gotchas.. I had PP is set up to import audio as mono tracks (edit - preferences - audio - Source Channel Mapping = mono) PP kept crashing when I tired the drag drop.. I think it might have worked if I had tried to drag and drop a mono file.. but I did not test that.
The rest of the mix I do in pp.