Premiere Pro does not AutoMatch loudness correctly

[AndrewTheGreat]

Premiere Pro 24.5 - but I've been having it since the Essential sound panel was introduced - 14700K, RTX 4080, 64 Gb Ram, fast SSDs, Win_11. All updated.

So I have newly created sequence with one track with a cut footage from one and the same clip:

It's cut in parts only, with no effects, and only some silence parts were removed, the rest is intact.

So I go to the Essential Sound panel and having selected all the cut pieces with Ctrl+A set all the footage to the Dialogue audio type. Then I choose the Podcast preset and get this:

As you can see Premiere Pro does not apply the Podcast preset to these parts.

If you view all the ES menus you'll notice this:

So with everything selected on the timeline I hit this Automatch button again and nothing happens - the two parts remain not matched.

If I select them separately and hit Automatch nothing happens either. 

The audio type of the two parts is the same as of the rest:

Clearing the audio type does not help either. The same is if you select the nearest part which has it all correct and try to automatch the "failty" clip to it - it just doesn't.

Audio gain with normalizing the peaks to the average level just pumps the volume up, but when you hit Automuch the two parts again remain intact.

I always get this type of a bug since Premoiere 23 or even earlier with smaller parts of clips both derived from a longer clip by cutting it or when using different footage. The same happens if some oudio was unlinked from the video when cutting everything at once (when none of the clips is selected).

[Kevin-Monahan]

The status of this bug report has been updated.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi AndrewTheGreat,

I appreciate the bug report and screenshots you sent in.

I hope the team will respond soon with a solution for you. Sorry for the frustration.

Thanks,
Kevin

[AndrewTheGreat]

@Kevin-Monahan 

Another example of the issue and a thing that may be related to it - a memory leak.

Here in the video I have 4 files from two cameras. They are placed one above the other (so there are only 2 clips on each track) and cut the whole footage. It's not that important - just for you to know what is goung on in the timeline. Then I go to the Essential sound and apply the podcast preset to the whole first track (again it's only two clips that were previously cut) - immediately you see that to some of the parts of a single clip the podcast preset was not applied. When I zoom in the timiline you can see those were the parts at the beginning of the track. Maybe some others too but there are so many cuts on the track that to look through the whole track you'll spend ages. Once I highlight all the parts of the two clips on the first track and hit Auto match nothing happens. And then if I apply Speech enhance to the parts on the first track I get an out of memory error, tons of them, despite the 64 gigs of ram in my system 54 of which are allocated for Premiere Pro.

No effects, no color correction - just putting the four clips onto the timeline of a freshly created project in a 1080 sequence and cutting the clips. And I often gen those Out of memory errors when trying to apply an Essential graphics preset or the Speech Enhance to a big amount of clips or cut parts of the same clip.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Thanks for the update, Andrew. I hope the team will respond to your bug report soon. @Matt_Stegner might want to take a look.

Cheers,
Kevin

[mstegner · Accepted solution]

Ok, I can’t help with the memory issue you are seeing below (I suggest you post a new issue under the Video Hardware Forum) but can explain what is happening with the Match Loudness.

What you are seeing is normal or expected.  It isn’t ideal, but it is expected.  The loudness normalization will scan though the audio of the clip, and assign each clip (from the in point to outpoint) an LUFS measurement.  Then adjust the gain based on that measurement. 

LUFS is an average of the loudness of audio for a period of time.  If a clip is too short, meaning that not enough time had transpired from the in to the out point, Premiere cannot successfully calculate the LUFS number.  So, without the LUFS measurement, Premiere cannot make an adjustment to the loudness of the clip.  In essence, the small clips are too short to work with the Auto-match functionality.

This isn’t a bug, it is just how it works. 

The only work around I could suggest is to select all of the edited clips on the track, nest them, and apply the loudness measurement to the nest.

[AndrewTheGreat]

Ok, thanks you @mstegner Th's become clearer, though it doesn't settle the memory loss issue or the problem itself because I need those clips to be unnested... Anyway, thanks for the answer

[mstegner]

Why do you need the clips un-nested? 

Auto-Match just sets the gain control.  You can always look at a clip that does have auto-match applied, determine how much gain change was applied by the Essential Sound Panel, then apply a similar amount to the clips that are too short for auto-match.

[AndrewTheGreat]

Good advice. Except that I may have hundrends of those smaller parts in a project... I think Adobe might just fix it and make it work with the clips and parts of any length. I don't understabd why you cannot make this feature analyze every part on the timeline and set the average volume for all of them. This works in Davinchi, this works in FCP. But it doesn't in Premiere Pro. But surely I can do everything manually

[mstegner]

"I don't understabd why you cannot make this feature analyze every part on the timeline and set the average volume for all of them".

The math to calculate the type of LUFS Premiere uses requires a certain length of audio.  If the clip is too short it will simply not work.