Essential Sound Ducking won't generate keyframes when target clip is soloed

[Logan_Barney5958]

In the essential sound panel, "Generate Keyframes" for Ducking will not create keyframes if the Audio Track the target clip is on is Soloed.

Reproduce: 

1) Have dialogue (or any other audio) on a seperate track than music. Label/tag audio types accordingly.

2) Solo the track with the music clip on it.

3) Attempt to generate ducking keyframes on the music clip.

Expected result: Keyframes ducking with the parameters specified should appear after generation on the music clip

Actual result: the "generate keyframes" button very briefly turns gray, an amplify audio effect is added to the music clip, and no keyframes are generated.

• Adobe Premiere Pro version – 25.3.0 (Build 84)
• Operating system – macOS  Sequioa 15.5

Affects all projects.

[Rach McIntire]

Hi @Logan_Barney5958, 

I can see the behavior you're describing.  Did this work for you correctly in past versions?

[Logan_Barney5958]

I'm sorry - I can't answer that. I've just run into this issue now, and I've switched over to Premiere from Resolve in the last month. "Generate Keyframes" has worked flawlessly for me up to this point - as long as I don't solo the track as described.

[Rach McIntire]

 I'm looking into whether this is intended behavior. Can you generate the keyframes with it unsoloed and then solo it afterwards?  I'm curious about your workflow.

[Logan_Barney5958]

If you're asking if I'm able to - yes. Unsoloing the track and re-generating works. 
I had the track soloed because I was editing multiple songs together with crossfades as background music, was going down the line generating keyframes at the same time, and didn't want to listen to the dialogue while placing my crossfades.

While frustrating and initially baffling, I could see how this might be a limitation of how Premiere handles the generation. My assumption as a User is that Essential Sound would ignore my timeline mutes and solos, since it's doing computations in the background.  My first assumption was to restart the program, restart my Mac, clear the media cache, etc. - do all the troubleshooting steps first. It seemed like a bug in Premiere's behind-the-scenes processing.

[R Neil Haugen]

From my experience, this is probably expected behavior. As it allows the user to select which tracks you want to work with when you quite possibly have multiple dialogue and other type tracks that you want to duck.

This way, the app knows what you specifically want.

[Logan_Barney5958]

This seems backwards and un-polished to me then. 

Why does Essential Sound have you Tag clips and let you select which type you'd like to duck against then? Where does it make it obvious that it's simply doing a shoddy mix-down of my timeline tracks?

Especially when - and I just tested this now - MUTING a track doesn't cause Essential Sound to ignore it.

If this is intended behavior, I would expect Premiere to ignore the muted Dialogue track and only generate keyframes for unmuted tracks with dialogue clips on them, but it generates keyframes just fine, even if the music track is the only track unmuted.
If this is intended behavior, I'm incredibly dissapointed and baffled.

[R Neil Haugen]

In my training, from more experienced audio people, muting and soloing are quite different in effect. I don't think you can equate them.

Because when soloing, it does ignore other tracks. Muting doesn't. You just don't hear muted tracks.

And I think that is very intentional, as it allows you to tell Premiere to either ignore other tracks, or not to ignore other tracks. You can have either behavior.

At your choice.

So it's not been a problem for me since learning how it is apparently intended to be used. Prior to that, it was durn confusing.

[Logan_Barney5958]

Have you ever used this exact behavior intentionally? What would be the use-case for a feature that simply breaks the keyframe generation?

I think you're making assumptions that soloing the track you'd like to generate keyframes on can help you pick and choose which tracks you'd like to duck against. If that's true, please walk me through it.

If this bug report was about MUTED tracks not contributing to keyframe generation, I would understand if this was intended behavior.

The issue I'm describing is not useful. It results in no keyframe generation. It does not behave the same as muting other tracks. Essential Sound makes no mention that it requires tracks to be unsoloed. 

"And I think that is very intentional, as it allows you to tell Premiere to either ignore other tracks, or not to ignore other tracks. You can have either behavior."

Alright. So when I tell Premiere to ignore other tracks, it doesn't generate keyframes. This is a "feature" that allows me to tell Premiere to not do the thing I asked it to do, or do the thing I asked it to do. If I "tell Premiere to ignore other tracks", it doesn't do the thing I just clicked on. I call that a bug or bad programming, not a feature.
Yes, there's a work-around: simply don't have the track soloed. But acting like this is something intentional that has a possible use case is unhelpful.

[R Neil Haugen]

I'm wondering if something else hasn't occurred to you ... that you can solo more than one track? That's another very non-apparent thing until you either find it out by poking the box, or someone helps with it.

[Stanley Arthur]

You're lucky. When I press "Generate Keyframes", PPro crashes.

[R Neil Haugen]

I've heard a couple other users with that, which would be so far past annoying ... ouch.

No clue what causes it though. Wish I had a suggestion. Past the typical dumping cache files and such which you've probably already tried.

[Rach McIntire]

Hi @Logan_Barney5958,

Sorry for the delay with the holiday weekend. I've checked with the team, and you are correct; it does appear to be a bug. I've written it up for our engineers. I'm glad you have a workaround for now, even if it isn't the most desirable. Hopefully, we will have a fix soon.

[Logan_Barney5958]

Thanks, Rach. Appreciate your time.