Audio clipping after importing video

Report · May 12, 2019

Hi everyone. I have a really annoying problem with one of the videos from my client. The main problem is that whenever I playback his video in the media players (such as default Windows media player, VLC) it sounds OK and without any clipping. When I import it to Audition, Premiere Pro, iZotope RX or playback it through online OneDrive or Dropbox player the audio becomes much louder and clipped. Here is also the link to the video OneDrive (It's really loud, be careful). The client has the same problem with video playback on his side, so I highly doubt that it has to do something with the audio setup. Is this has to do something with codecs? Or video was recorded/rendered improperly? And most importantly, how to fix this problem? Thanks everyone for the answers.

Report · May 13, 2019

olegs31463921 wrote
The client has the same problem with video playback on his side, so I highly doubt that it has to do something with the audio setup. Is this has to do something with codecs? Or video was recorded/rendered improperly? And most importantly, how to fix this problem? Thanks everyone for the answers.

You're not kidding! Let me show you what happens when I attempt to load it here:

This, as far as I can tell, is mostly archive material. Even allowing for relatively recent interviews, the frame dimensions are extremely overdone - this will look more than adequate at 1920x1080, and that will almost halve the size of the file at a stroke. I'd use an H264 encoder for this, but look carefully at the audio settings - make sure they are AAC rather than any other setting, and try reducing the overall bit rate to about 16MB - that will also reduce the file size, and you'll not notice the difference on older material. I'm not really an encoder expert, but my experiences with them have shown that you can make a heck of a lot of difference to the way a file plays by not having it anything like as overblown as that! FWIW, I've got some good results from the Adobe Media Encoder's H264 coder.

Report · May 13, 2019

I agree that 2560x1440 is rather extravagant for the video content. But I managed to play the file directly from One Drive. Yes the audio is very loud and distorted. I would like to download and investigate further but 9.3Gb is too big and is going to take forever to download and use up too much of my broadband allowance. Is it possible to post a shorter version that won't use so much of my data. Just a couple of minutes would do but encoded in the same way as the original.

Report · May 13, 2019

Thanks guys for your time. The problem was solved by uploading the video to Youtube instead of OneDrive. It probably has to do something with OneDrive video encoding algorithm, so if anyone will experience the same problem you can give Youtube a try.