Premiere/Audition workflow for polywaves

[Thomas25297751b3dn]

Aloha!

tl;dr

I want to use Audition to clean the audio for a short film, and the workflow isn't working.

I've got a short film teetering on the point between rough and fine cut, so I'm ready to start getting serious about audio. I want to do most of the initial work (noise removal, spectral repair, normalization) in Audition.

If I right-click on a clip in the Timeline and say "Edit in Audition," it opens that instance in Audition, and when I save changes they cascade back to Premiere. A new clip appears both on the Timeline and in the Project as "File_Extracted." Ok, fine, but...

Most of these audio clips are used multiple times, with separate in and out points. What I want it to edit the source clip, and have those changes cascade into the project. I don't want to manually do the same noise correction on five sections of the same clip.

If I right-click on the audio file in the Project bin, and hit "Edit in Audition," it opens in Audition. Any changes I make and save appear in the Project bin as "File_Extracted" but do not cascade into the Timeline instances.

The original is a polywave, and the extracted files are single mono files. I believe that's why this is breaking.

Within Audition, there are manipulations I can do to the polywave directly, but using the most powerful tools involves first extracting mono files from the polywave. I could save those mono files, and work my way through the Timeline relinking one at a time, but that's ridiculous. Plus, there are about 2,000 edits, each with as many as 5 tracks.

I could, having made and cleaned the mono files, use the waveform editor in Audition to create a new polywave, or to replace the contents of the original polywave. I'd be working at the system level, replacing the actual source files themselves, which should cascade into Premiere as it would have no idea I'd made any change. A brute-force attack at the OS level, replacing the source files themselves.

There has to be a workflow that lets me edit the source material and have those changes cascade throughout all instances on the Timeline, just like placing a LUT on a master clip. Right? This workflow can't be this dysfunctional, can it? Can anyone tell me what that workflow is?

Mahalo!

[Warren Heaton]

Hi @Thomas25297751b3dn:

It's nice to see you over here in the Adobe Community Forums as well as the Adobe Premiere Pro Editors group on Facebook.

If you want to make destructive edits to the original source audio that are reflected where ever that source is used in a Timeline, select the original source audio in the Premiere Pro Project panel or Bin panel and then choose Edit > Edit in Adobe Audition > Clip.  This extracts a duplicate of the original source audio and opens in it Adobe Audition.  In Premiere Pro, you'll see the original source audio and the extracted audio (Premiere appends "extracted" to the tail of the filename).  In Audition, edit the extracted audio as needed and save.  Back in Premiere Pro, the edits made to the extracted audio should refresh immediately.  Right-click the original source audio and choose Replace Footage then navigate to and select the extracted audio.  Premiere Pro will now use the extracted audio in any Sequence where the original source audio was used.

You may also want to review how to round trip a sound mix from Premiere Pro to Audition where we send our Sequence to a session in Audition (transferring effects applied in Premiere Pro with it) and then return to the same Sequence with stems.

 - Warren

[Thomas25297751b3dn]

Aloha Warren!

Unfortunately, the workflow you're describing, although logical, doesn't actually work when the origial source files are ploywave files. 

When placed on the Timeline, Premiere makes temporary copies of the individual tracks within the ploywave and presents them as separate clips. Going back to the Project bin and using "Edit in Audition" does open the original polywave in Audition. That much works. However, in order to use some of the more powerful effects in Audition, you must first extract the individual tracks into separate mono files.

Audition returns these new mono files to Premiere; it does not make changes to the source polywave. Thus, the new "extracted" files appear in the Premiere project bin, but do not cascade into sequences, as they weren't the form used in the original edit.

I removed the "correct" lable from this response. I don't want to limit future discussion!

[EDIT] removed an embarassing number of typos

[Warren Heaton]

@Thomas25297751b3dn 

After returning to the Premiere Pro, right-click the polywave source and use Replace Footage to swap the polywave for the extracted (and edited) file.  That source will be replaced in any Sequence in which it's used.

Your workflow seems to be unique.  If you post it as an "idea", please let me know and I'll vote for it; however, it may be an up-hill battle.  In post production, avoiding destructive edits to audio source is a best practice and the workflow for round tripping from Premeire Pro to Audition supports that.

[Thomas25297751b3dn]

Unique? That mystifies me, but it would, wouldn't it?
Seriously... how is this different from the idea that, instead of color correcting individual clips, you can color correct the source clip, and have that change ripple thru the project? That's all I'm asking! And the workflow, the design, is kind of in place, except for discriminating against polywaves. 

[Warren Heaton]

If you're asking about having Source Effects for audio, that's a great feature request.

Replacing the source audio file does affect (or ripple through) all affiliates of that audio in the project and the workflow described applies for WAV files and AIF files.

Even with picture, I don't see how you would want to permanently change the source footage.

If you want to edit your source audio in Audition, just open the files in Audition, make the edits and save.  There's no need to send it from Premiere Pro as you're not editing sound to picture and you're not trying to preserve the original files.

[Thomas25297751b3dn]

It's not that I'm endorsing destructive edits. I'm lamenting the fact that I am forced, and in a very labor-intensive way, to use them. 

What I want, all I want, is to be able to use Audition's most powerful tools on audio that's already part of a Premiere project. You keep telling me the workflow works. I keep explaining that it doesn't, not when attempting to use Audition's effects on polywave files. Having to extract mono files from the ploywave seems to be the point at which there's no practical way to re-integrate them into an existing Premiere project. Even using Replace Footage presupposes that I, not Audition, have built a replacement ploywave. Audition will automatically reduce a ploywave to multiple mono files. It'll happily clean those files. But the idea that they need to be reassembled into a polywave in order to take their place in the existing Premiere project seems to be missing. ANd even rebuilding the polywave in AUdition is a work-sround process, involving creating a new file with custom tracks, then copying and pasting content into them.

Maybe we're not talking about the same thing?