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Participant
April 28, 2021
Question

Why is After Effects adding a space/silence to the beginning and end of the audio in my file

  • April 28, 2021
  • 5 replies
  • 1331 views

I am trying to create a video that is a seamless loop in both the visual and audio. After I export the file from after effects, the visual plays in a seamless loop, but the audio does not - there is a tiny space of silence in between. I imported the file into Adobe Premiere, along with the original audio file, and the waveforms are different. There is silence at the beginning and end of the waveform in the After Effects file, in addition to the waveform being slightly off throughout. I cannot figure out why AE is doing this or how to fix it. Any insights are greatly appreciated!

5 replies

Participating Frequently
March 7, 2026

Figured out a workaround, because this issue of audio-only exports getting extra empty space was happening to me out of both Premiere and Media Encoder.  If you export as an mp4 or other video file, the in & out will be correct with no extra space, then you can import into Audition and simply export as mp3 or whatever you need, and it will be right.  But if you try to do this video-to-audio conversion using Media Encoder, you’ll get the same extra space issue, super weird.

Kirmm Ella
Known Participant
January 8, 2025

Yes there is a problem there especially if you're making perfect loops. The tiny sound cut and silence at the end is there.

In AE all sounds fine while editing - there is a perfect audio loop on playback but the render always has the ending cut out. Here's a screenshot of the video end in Premiere. Changing the audio format from AAC to MPEG fixed it for me.

mohaliaAuthor
Participant
April 29, 2021

After many hours of stress, I have found a workaround, in case anyone has this issue in the future. I read on another forum that the way that adobe compresses the audio will always result in this glitch and there is no way around it. They recommended using Handbrake to convert the .mov file. I tried handbrake with default settings and still got the gap in the audio at the end of the file, but not the beginning - very weird! I kept playing around with the settings and was able to export the file as .m4v (with AC3 audio codec) and keep the original audio intact. From there, I changed the extension of the file to .mp4 and all was good. 

Participant
November 7, 2022

Thank you for the update @mohalia - I've been struggling with this for days. Can you please walk me through your process? Are you exporting from After Effects to Media Encoder? I can't seem to find the format to make an m4v with an AC3 codec. 

Community Expert
April 28, 2021

Nothing wrong. There are a few frames before the audio starts and ends. Open the audio clip in Audition to verify. Nothing wrong except the expectations. 

mohaliaAuthor
Participant
April 28, 2021

Yes, there is something wrong. In AE, the audio starts on the first frame. When I bring in the exported AE clip to Premiere, the audio starts a few frames after. I am trying to make a seamless loop - the altered audio file ruins this. As you can see in the screenshots, the original audio file (on bottom) starts at the very beginning while the AE audio file does not. Why should I expect the exported file to have different audio than what I put in?

mohaliaAuthor
Participant
April 28, 2021

I just tried exporting the file from Premiere with the original audio (with audio from AE file muted), and Premiere seems to be doing the same thing! Adding a tiny bit of silence at the beginning and end! Aghhhhhh