Need help merging the final audio and video together!

[Lee James]

I am relatively new to producing videos and would like to know how other people merge their video and audio into a file that YouTube will accept, and my clients can play themselves?

With the method I've been using (below), the audio cannot be AAC, which means they don't play on Apple devices. Right now I have a client urgently wanting to see her video, but I can't find any way to show it to her because she uses Apple devices.

Here's how I am going about merging my audio and video - please tell me if you know a better way!

1. In Adobe Media Encoder, render the video as h.264

2. In Premiere Pro, output a WAV using the "Waveform Audio" setting (can't find any way to do this in AMC).

3. Go into my audio workstation, import the WAV file (containing the dialog and sound effects), begin working on my soundtrack. (I'm a musician.)

4. Arrange, mix, and master the soundtrack and dialog.

5. Export the audio as a 48k WAV.

6. Merge together the h.264 video and WAV audio using the program "MKV Merge". This result is a .mkv file that plays perfectly on my computer but YouTube will not accept and not everyone can view.

7. Use the program VLC to wrap the video into an mp4 container.

However, the two problems I have with VLC are:

1. I can't give it a video containing AAC audio, because the resulting video always has out-of-sync audio!

2. If I get VLC to encode the audio itself, all of the codec options (including AAC) result in silence. The only option that works is MPEG Audio. These files play fine on my machine, but not for Apple users.

I've struggled with this alone for weeks now, but I need help from video professionals. I'm hoping someone out there can advise me? It would be so nice just to have some program that would merge together h.264 video and AAC audio into a YouTube-ready file?

I've looked for a solution online and found nothing. Someone suggested using a program called Handbrake, but when I tried using Handbrake, it RE-ENCODED my video!! I would not touch any program that thinks it's acceptable to re-encode a lossy format. That's just crazy.

Note that I also use Premiere Pro, so I've posted the same question on the Premiere Pro forum too. Not wishing to spam, but I wasn't sure which forum was the best one as I use both equally.

[Jose Panadero]

If you are using Premiere, what you can do is to import the mixed WAV file for adding to you edited video in the same timeline. Then as easy as File > Export > Media. You will have the option to select H264 as the format and an option to select any of the presets made by Adobe for exporting, where you can find the ones for Apple Devices, Youtube and Vimeo ones.

[Lee James]

Thank you, that is definitely helpful, however, it's not a solution to the problem.

I don't want to have to re-render my entire video every single time I simply update the audio. I might make dozens of changes to the audio. Re-rendering the video each time would take forever and be totally pointless.

Once the video is done, it's done. Finished. I don't want to have to think about going back into After Effects, or Premiere and re-rendering it.

For example, I've just made a 1-minute long video in After Effects. It's taken about 30 minutes to render the video. If I use MKV Merge to combine the audio and video files, I can change the audio as many times as I like and it takes literally less than 1 second to update the video file with new audio. However, if I was going to use the method here to combine the audio and video files, it would take me half an hour each time, just to make a small change to the audio! Surely Adobe doesn't expect people to work that way? It seems bizarre.

I just want a simple way to merge video and audio together! Surely there must be one?

[Andrew Yoole]

You're misunderstanding the Premiere suggestion.

Put your rendered video file on the video track.  Put your mixed audio file on the audio track.

Export, directly in Premiere Pro or via Media Encoder.  Your one minute video will export in seconds.

But, as an observation, you shouldn't be rendering H264 as your final render if there are other steps in your workflow after the render.  Render to a high quality intermediate codec (like Quicktime Animation etc) and then compress to H264 in the final pass with the mixed audio.

[Ramon98A5]

Combining audio- and video file is called 'mux' or 'smart render', look for that solution.

I did not get Premiere to do that (yet).

[OussK]

What Jose say's is the best solution, but since you don't need to encode the video again,

so why you don't got to the first steps and include you audio with the original video you have and export a new .h.264 video file

or simply in the first step try to export a better quality codec video like ProRez or something similar, so you will not lose any quality later when you will export a H.264 video.

Also premiere pro, have a smart render feature where they will be automatically render your file without any re-encoded but this feature work on specific type of format you can check it here Smart rendering in Premiere Pro