CREATING MERGED CLIPS HANGS MAC M1 Mini

[Christopher23108600kvj5]

Hi ! 

So this is super weird. 

Today, an entire computer lab that I was teaching in experienced the same problem for every single student but one and also myself. When merging and audio and a RED clip from within a bin every merge option caused every M1 mini to hang (Spinning beach ball of no return). Only way out was to force quite. Every time, 9 of 10 students. Merging with timecode, markers, IN points, and Waveform audio. There was no way out. 

REDRAW picture footage
.wav audio
Select both clips in an otherwise empty bin, right click MERGE
choose parameters 
Press OK and ....HANG

OS 12.5.1 
Premiere Pro 22.3
Mac M1 Mini 9,1

Any clues ? 

[R Neil Haugen]

Weird!

But then the better and recommended option is to join video and audio with the Multicam process.

Merge clips has a number of issues because it was designed for quick timeline joins really.

Their big pdf file on recommended long-form and episodic workflows stresses this, especially for anything where you may be sending audio out or files for color/vfx.

Neil

[Christopher23108600kvj5]

Thanks Neil, 

I appreciate your response. 

Merging clips from a temp bin is the standard practice, at least in Post on the East coast here, although usually with AVID. Maybe that looks a little old school now ?  And it has worked quite well for the last 6 years, even with proxies and round tripping to Resolve for grading. 

I have read about the multi-cam workaround for merging on the timeline and have used multi-cam for...well multiple cameras. 

Is that document you mention easy to find. I would like to read it. And thank you very uch for pointing it out to me. 

CSL

[R Neil Haugen]

Avid and Premiere are rather different in how they approach and name things. Like working with some things in Premiere and Resolve ... the names are different. "Power windows" versus "mask".

In this case, the Merge Clips function is not the exact thing as the same named feature in Avid.

Merge Clips in Pr is not by design intended for actually "marrying" separate audio and video from the get go in a bin. It's design function is to make a quick join on a timeline ... when you want to add audio tracks to a video track, then edit them together. Maybe grab the clip and 'slip' or 'slide' the part being used on the timeline, something like that.

But Premiere's Merge Clips has numerous limitations that make it not a good tool for what you're using it for.

The by-design appropriate tool for merging video and separately recorded audio in Premiere for all general editing purposes is as oft stated, the Multicam process. And it doesn't matter if you have one camera and ten separate audio, ten cameras and one separate audio ... or ten different camera clips each with a separate audio clip in the bin.

For example, if you have a bin of ten video clips, each with a separate audio clip, and select all/Multicam ... Premiere will make ten different sequences, one for each camera/audio pairing.

Each sequence is essentially treated as a clip in Premiere and you can do all normal editing on it, such as top & tail (Q and W shortcuts) ... which mostly will not work with merged clips.

And flattened Multicams can be used in XML/EDL workflows, where Merged clips are ... problematic.

And yes, that's totally confusing for most people coming into Premiere!

Jarle Leirpoll covers this at length in his massive 1200 page manual for Premiere, “The Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro” ... and Jarle was also the chief writer for the next link ...

Adobe Long-form and Episodic Best Practices Guide 

Next, Jarle’s blog expanded of the pdf Multicam section with additional information: Premiere Pro Multicam

It's a semantic issue between "multicam" and "merged" ... and in Premiere, the one means the other ... weirdly.

I'm also a contributing author over at MixingLight.com, a pro colorist's teaching website. For people mostly based in Resolve, working with Pr/Resolve, Avid/Resolve workflows. With ProTools and Baselight and other things in the mix.

There's several articles and insights on Premiere/Resolve workflows ... and telling the Pr editor to avoid merged clips, using Multicam instead, features prominently in them.

Neil

[Christopher23108600kvj5]

Neal, 

That is an awesome reply. Thank you again for your thouroughness on the process you recommend. Very convincing. I will follow your links and try exactly as you suggest in the future.  

Really apprecaite your time and advice. 

Still, I wonder what is going on with the hanging that didn't happen before? 

CSL

[R Neil Haugen]

As to the Hanging ... who knows? They change parts of the underlying code constantly as part of the general work of updating the underlying code. And that can have intriguinging effects at times ... totally unexpected. Could be something like that, or ... something in a program on your computer interacting with Premiere's audio stuff ... hurts the brain to figure all that out.

Neil

[Christopher23108600kvj5]

I've been told that upgrading to Premiere Pro 23 (October update) seems to have fixed the proble. It could also be that the cache or the prefs need to be cleared to move on from the issue.