Skip to main content
K
kevina41766135
Inspiring
August 8, 2019
Answered

Five Channels of Audio with h.264 codec?

  • August 8, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 2953 views

Ultimately, I'm trying to create an ingest preset so that when I bring footage into Premiere, it will create proxies. I compared a handful of codecs (Prores Proxy, Dnx, Cineform) and none of them come anywhere close to h.264 when it comes to image quality and file size. They all create files that look worse while taking up ten times as much space as h.264.

The problem is my footage (Alexa Mini) has five channels of audio, and apparently h.264 does not support five channels of audio. All of the channels are blank audio from the camera, so I don't care about them, but Premiere will not ingest the footage using an h.264 proxy codec because the audio channels do not match.

Am I missing something here? 1. Why do video codecs even have varied audio options? 2. Why does h.264 not support five channels?

From looking at older threads, it seems like this was totally doable two years ago before they changed the export settings around. You could choose to export a Quicktime, then just pick the H.264 codec for the video and "uncompressed" for the audio, and you could set it to five channels. Now if you want h.264, you have to choose that as the filetype instead of Quicktime, and you don't have an uncompressed audio option. Why would they get rid of that ability?

Is there another codec that works as well as h.264 and allows more audio channels? (Like I said, Prores, Dnx, and Cineform are not good enough.)

My last resort is to batch remove every audio channel from the source files, but I'd rather not do that if I don't have to.

Help!

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer excited_Genie16B8

    "Prores, Dnx, and Cineform are not good enough"

    I question that.

    I recommend using the default Cineform presets.  Yes, they're larger.  But that's what makes them edit so well, and the quality is sufficient that the proxies can be used for grading.

    1 reply

    E
    excited_Genie16B8Correct answer
    Legend
    August 8, 2019

    "Prores, Dnx, and Cineform are not good enough"

    I question that.

    I recommend using the default Cineform presets.  Yes, they're larger.  But that's what makes them edit so well, and the quality is sufficient that the proxies can be used for grading.

      R
      rodneyb56060189
      Legend
      August 8, 2019

      I googled the arri mini and looked at specs and it looks like it uses prores and raw and never uses H264 and has 2 channels of PCM. I could be looking at the wrong camera specs though.

      If that's the case this post doesn't make much sense yet, having 5 channels of audio ? And why test proxies of stuff that is supposedly native  ( prores ) ?  I don't get it.

      when importing stuff in PPro color choices is there some setting that says " Arri " and the poster thinks his camera is now an Arri camera source ??

      K
      kevina41766135Author
      Inspiring
      August 9, 2019

      Uh, no I didn't read the word "Arri" somewhere and think that means it's Arri footage. I literally watched the footage being shot on an Alexa Mini lol

      I know the clips have five channels of audio because I"m looking at the clips right now, and there are five channels of audio. Not sure if my post doesn't make sense or if you just can't make sense of it.

      I have Alexa footage and want to make proxies for editing, ideally with the h.264 codec. The footage is not natively h.264. That's how proxies work.

      Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
      Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices