Exporting Takes FOREVER to Render Audio Before Exporting

[JMLfilm]

Hi there community!  I'm having a heck of a time exporting my feature reels because for some reason the Audio is taking an exceptionally long time to render.  This has been a problem with this particular project and after using Premiere for 10+ years, I'm really stuck and have no idea what to do.  I can't walk away for an hour every time I need to export a 12 minute video.

I'm using the latest version of Premiere, Macbook Pro 16-inch M3 Max 128GB, Sonoma 14.7

This project is running 6K video, and the production audio is 48k 32-bit.  I'm also using a mix of other audio sources from sound effects libraries, music rips, etc -- it all plays just fine as I'm cutting, but the longer I work on this project, the longer these audio renders take.  I don't even get a progress bar when the audio render starts, I just get this for 20-min to an hour before the video render starts.  The video takes no time at all.

I've got about 32 tracks of audio for organization, though most of them are unoccupied as I only have to do brief flurried of complicated SFX.

I have the tracks routed to 3 submixes to separate Dx, Fx, and MX, and I also have 3 busses set up for light reverb and noise reduction that I turn on and off sometimes for the dialogue -- but that's it. No other audio effects are being used, no 3rd party plugins, nothing fancy.

After doing some reading on older posts it looks like it could be a mis-match in project settings compared to my source audio, but this might be outdated as I can't find a way to change my project to 32-bit.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!  Thank you!!!

Josh

[Mike Dziennik]

I've never tried to use 32bit audio (as far as I'm aware...) but one thing that could help is in the Preferences>Audio you could choose: Render audio when rendering video.

If your audio is rendered as your working then it possibly won't need to render as much when you go to export.

[JMLfilm]

thanks for the idea! That might save some time!

[Averdahl]

This happens usually because the audio is not 16-bit and/or that some/all of the audio is compressed such as mp3/mp4. There is no way to change the project to 32-bit. 

So if you have ~32 tracks of audio+busses+effects with a mix of the abowe that could be the issue. If not, ~32 tracks+busses+effects can be resource hungry as well. I do sometimes render out the final audio to a wav/aif and place that on a new track and mute the rest to take some load off the exporting process. Or, do the audio mix in an audio app and export it and use that file inside Premiere Pro. Too late now maybe.

Maybe exporting to QuickTime > H.264 and set the audio to 32-bit will help, if you want H.264. (Probably not)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!  Thank you!!!

By @JMLfilm

[JMLfilm]

also a good idea. Thanks!  yeah too late now, but good to keep in mind on the next project!

[PaulMurphy · Accepted solution]

32-bit audio shouldn't be causing long render times before exporting starts. The delay is more likely due to a mismatch in audio sample rates. If your sequence is set to 48 kHz but some of your audio files are 44.1 kHz, Premiere Pro needs to resample the audio before exporting, which can significantly slow down the process.

To check if you have 44.1 kHz audio files in your project:

1. Go to File > New > Search Bin.
2. Set Search to Audio Info.
3. Set Find to 44100.

To speed up the process, convert these audio files to 48 kHz before exporting:

1. Use Adobe Media Encoder to convert the files to 48 kHz.
2. In Premiere Pro, offline the original 44.1 kHz files.
3. Relink them to the newly converted 48 kHz versions.

This will prevent Premiere Pro from needing to resample the audio during export, reducing render time.

[JMLfilm]

This sounds exactly right. Thank you so much for this clarity!  I do have a lot of audio at 44.1k (temp music), so this makes total sense.

Great recommendation, thank you!!

Josh