What are PEAK files for and where to enable them?

[Paul_Gringo]

After a clean installation of Premiere, the function of creating a PEAK file disappeared. Is it really necessary if I work with an SSD drive and how can I turn it on and off?

[R Neil Haugen]

Check the Preferences dialog. And also the Project or Production settings dialog.

[Paul_Gringo]

what should I look for????logical, but your answer is very vague

[T - Sal · Accepted solution]

Hello, These files hold audio waveforms of individual clips,

For Adobe Premiere Pro:

• PEAK files are automatically generated when you import audio or video files into your project. If you don’t see the waveform immediately, Premiere will generate the PEAK file as you scrub through the timeline.
• You can manage PEAK file preferences under Preferences > Media. Here you can control where Premiere stores these files and clear or regenerate them if needed.

[FulStak Videditr]

Hello T - Sal and Adobe Community,

We checked the preference in Premiere Pro under Media (and else where) an see no option to generate peak files, especially for video. We are trying to get Premiere Pro to generate peaks files for vMix H.264 in MP4 container. Even if we convert to footage to ProRes (which are monstrous larger files, even at LT), Premiere Pro still does not generate peak files from the ProRes in the .mov container. Even a native camera file, such as an MP4 from the Cannot R6 generates a peak file. And a Program Mix.mov from vMix also generates a peak file. But for some reason, there is a particular format set from vMix that the editor will not generate peak files. Thank you for any information you can provide.

[MyerPj]

PIA, I downloaded vmix and managed to generate the AVI, and I saw that the peak file was written, I have audio and the correct waveform. Where are you looking?

[FulStak Videditr]

Hello MyerPj,

I found and tested peak file generation and they are all appearing, including waveform and see each file by name generating in the subfolder. I tested out several formats.

One of the things we are trying to do is to reduce the freeze/stall or run away playhead problem using vMix Multirecorder h.264 footage. This all gave me an idea and I think we may try passing the source files through Media Encoder first, with the same bit rate, and see if this helps the re-encoded footage work better for Adobescape. I know it helped for audio, when we re-encode the multitrack out as .wav or .aiff (when we extract from the multitrack), it flies, especially on later exports. But never thought to try this for video. Beforehand we used proxies, but we still have to switch often and the proxies would be one frame off, plus we use long form footage (over 2 hours on average).

We'll try re-encoding through Media Encoder. Were trying to get the source footage more responsive. We were looking to see if we could solve this issue via peak file usage, but seeing now that is not going to be the case.

[MyerPj · Accepted solution]

What makes you think they are off? Do you have any waveforms at all showing?

Here's where they go:

[MyerPj]

If you are going to run it thru ME, that might be a good time to switch it the ProRes, or GoPro (Quicktime). You can even use ProRes "Proxy" format. Otherwise, you would be taking a generation hit. ProRes is visually lossless. Do you have a short sample footage I can try here. Post it on Google drive, etc, and share the link.