Need help merging the final audio and video together!

[Lee James]

I am relatively new to producing videos and would like to know how other people merge their video and audio into a file that YouTube will accept, and my clients can play themselves.

With the method I've been using (below), the audio cannot be AAC, which means they don't play on Apple devices. Right now I have a client urgently wanting to see her video, but I can't find any way to show it to her because she uses Apple devices.

Here's how I am going about merging my audio and video - please tell me if you know a better way!

1. In Adobe Media Encoder, render the video as h.264

2. In Premiere Pro, output a WAV using the "Waveform Audio" setting (can't find any way to do this in AMC).

3. Go into my audio workstation, import the WAV file (containing the dialog and sound effects), begin working on my soundtrack. (I'm a musician.)

4. Arrange, mix, and master the soundtrack and dialog.

5. Export the audio as a 48k WAV.

6. Merge together the h.264 video and WAV audio using the program "MKV Merge". This result is a .mkv file that plays perfectly on my computer but YouTube will not accept and not everyone can view.

7. Use the program VLC to wrap the video into an mp4 container.

However, the two problems I have with VLC are:

1. I can't give it a video containing AAC audio, because the resulting video always has out-of-sync audio!

2. If I get VLC to encode the audio itself, all of the codec options (including AAC) result in silence. The only option that works is MPEG Audio.

I've struggled with this alone for weeks now, but I need help from video professionals. I'm hoping someone out there can advise me? It would be so nice just to have some program that would merge together h.264 video and AAC audio into a YouTube-ready file?

I've looked for a solution online and found nothing. Someone suggested using a program called Handbrake, but when I tried using Handbrake, it RE-ENCODED my video!! I would not touch any program that thinks it's acceptable to re-encode a lossy format. That's just crazy.

Note that I also use After Effects, so I've posted the same question on the AE forum too. Not wishing to spam, but I wasn't sure which forum was the best one.

[eikonoklastes]

Master your audio first, then bring it into Premiere and replace your previous audio (back up your previous sequence first).

Now export your H.264 video along with the audio from Premiere, and upload to YouTube.

[excited_Genie16B8]

MP4 files using H.264 video codec and AAC audio are the industry standard.  If someone is using a device that doesn't work with industry standard files, they need either a better media player, or a better device.

[Lee James]

A moderately helpful solution was provided, but it's not a true solution. I don't want to have to re-render my entire video every single time I update the audio. That would take forever. Once the video is done, I don't want to have to think about re-rendering it. It's done. Finished. I just want a good way to merge video and audio together!

For example, I've just made a video that took 30 minutes to render in AME. I use MKV Merge to combine the audio and video files, I can change the audio as many times as I like and it takes a fraction of a second to change the video. However, if I use the method here to combine the audio and video files, it would take me half an hour each time, for every small change I make to the audio! Surely that cannot be the way Adobe expect people to work?

[eikonoklastes]

Export a master video from Premiere as either:

- Uncompressed (will create a gigantic file),

- a lossless codec, like QuickTime Animation, which will still create a relatively large file compared to H.264, but nowhere nearly as large as uncompressed

- Something like GoPro Cineform, which is a pretty good intermediate format, with minimal quality loss even after multiple re-encodes.

Then, create a new sequence for your master video and (re)mastered audio, and use that to export your H.264 from Premiere.