Why does "Calculating Audio Peaks" take soooo long?

Report · May 10, 2017

You know, I get the feeling that as Adobe continues to enhance its Creative Cloud products via updates, it ONLY has the high end commercial sector in mind and we little guys in the educational, government, and similar sectors are all but forgotten about. With Adobe's latest release of Premiere Pro, CC 2017.1, somehow they've *greatly* INCREASED the amount of time it takes to "calculate audio peaks" just after doing a simple audio gain on a clip. Granted, because we do long government meetings at 2-4 hours on a single clip, that's quite a long clip to work with, but with all versions prior to 2017.1 it still happened relatively quickly. Can you guys at Adobe start making your technology faster for those of us who deal with very long clips like the long, admittedly boring committee meetings and such? We also do some short, informational videos here and it ties up our editors for a progress bar like "Calculating Audio Peaks" to take as long as it does before even being able to render the meeting out for our website/social media. And that's if we gain it up to the right level; sometimes it's trial and error since the Audio Gain dialog box doesn't even show us how much to gain it up because it's always calculating. We just have to pick a number based on what we're seeing in the audio meter and click OK just so it can start the forever process of "Calculating Audio Peaks". And just so you know, we don't have sluggard systems; they should be plenty enough for standard compressed HD - two four-core processors, 64GB system RAM, Quadro K5000, and shared media storage on a video server connected via Gigabit Ethernet.

Report · May 10, 2017

I get the feeling that as Adobe continues to enhance its Creative Cloud products via updates, it ONLY has the high end commercial sector in mind

That's funny. From my perspective, it seems as if Adobe is going after the no-skill YouTuber's and other very low end, barely 'professional' users.

I look at the difference between the Essential Sound panel in the latest Premiere Pro, and the Fairlight engine in the newest Resolve, and it's clear to me which really wants the Pro market.

Report · Jan 14, 2019

The ESP is simply a quick interface for generalized audio work.

They assume any major work or any experienced user will use the link to Audition which is a pretty decent audio app.

Neil

Report · Jan 14, 2019

I sure don't want decent audio features in a different program, and be limited in my main NLE program.. Adobe assumes too much, and doesn't pay attention to what users want. We want efficiency and stability, then new features!

Report · Jan 14, 2019

Don't understand your comment. There's a lot of fast audio you can do in Pr, and pretty decently when you know how. I know of people doing 5.1 plus multiple dialog tracks per language and stereo pair tracks within Pr. (Jarle Leirpoll's like 1200 page ebook "The Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro has over a hundred pages of audio advice and advanced multi language and track workflows. )

I presume you do understand everything used by the ESP is available in the Audio effects list, the ESP is simply a nifty interface for lightweight use, and anything you do with the ESP puts the underlying effects used in the ECP, so you can easily open each effect and modify to your heart's content.

But as with the link to AfterEffects, taking a project's audio to Au takes a couple seconds to open the project in a full multitrack DAW. Do your work, back to Pr in seconds.

So you want a "lite" audio interface in Pr, you got it.

You want an extensive list of the individual effects to control, you got it.

You want to edit in a DAW, you got it.

Neil

Report · Jan 15, 2019

https://forums.adobe.com/people/R+Neil+Haugen wrote
Don't understand your comment. There's a lot of fast audio you can do in Pr, and pretty decently when you know how. I know of people doing 5.1 plus multiple dialog tracks per language and stereo pair tracks within Pr. (Jarle Leirpoll's like 1200 page ebook "The Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro has over a hundred pages of audio advice and advanced multi language and track workflows. )
I presume you do understand everything used by the ESP is available in the Audio effects list, the ESP is simply a nifty interface for lightweight use, and anything you do with the ESP puts the underlying effects used in the ECP, so you can easily open each effect and modify to your heart's content.
But as with the link to AfterEffects, taking a project's audio to Au takes a couple seconds to open the project in a full multitrack DAW. Do your work, back to Pr in seconds.
So you want a "lite" audio interface in Pr, you got it.
You want an extensive list of the individual effects to control, you got it.
You want to edit in a DAW, you got it.
Neil

I was more ranting than anything..haha

My point was more about Adobe assuming things, as you've stated they do. I was also taking into consideration the original post's comments when I replied regarding the calculating bug, and how Premiere isn't stable. I don't like that Adobe assumes what Editors want. The internet and this forum is filled with annoyed customers complaining about Adobe putting out new features, or changing features, instead of making it more stable.

Yea, Adobe Audition is great, and yes, people do professional audio work in Premiere, I agree with you.

I've edited over a 1000 projects I'd say at this point and several hundred commercial projects, I don't want a 'lite' audio interface in Premiere. I want the ability to copy effects in the track mixer, save presets in the track mixer, not have to wait a minute for it to calculate when I adjust the audio gain. Premiere keeps introducing graphics/tracking/masking options like AE has, so you can stay and do intermediate work all within Pr. That's great (If it's not buggy), but for audio, still in release 12.0.2, I can't even adjust the gain of the audio without Pr freezing up for a minute.

It's an expensive subscription, and the competition, Resolve, includes very professional audio functionality within the program I believe, for free.

If Adobe keeps going in the direction they are; charging a premium for buggy software, (Premiere doesn't even have background rendering, that's been a feature in Final Cut for years.), It's only a matter of time until people change to Resolve because it's free, or some other software that's less expensive. I think Resolve 16 will cause a lot of problems for Adobe.

Report · Jan 15, 2019

Yup. Although many of your peer editors have used ESP heavily, I understand the feeling. Some of the sections of Pr are designed for "Lite" appearance. Or to protect us from ourselves ... and that is 1) helpful for a certain part of the total user base and 2) VERY annoying to another segment of the user base.

I get rather annoyed at 'features' that protect us from harming our pixels. Parts of the color setup are annoying, such as the Lumetri basic tab having no usable Black level control. The current "Blacks" adjustment wags the tail of the dog from about level 20 or so. But won't do a first correction without jumping about what, 5-6 levels? Neither action what I'd want.

I want to save Presets of multiple Lumetri instances without Pr stripping my names off each instance. You can select say five instances in the ECP and "Save as Preset" ... get five instances of Lumetri saved, with settings. But no NAMES per instance. The whole reason for the names is so you know what is done in each instance! And ... saved presets should open up exactly as saved ... open to the same section of whatever effect you were using at the time.

I've asked for these ... and other things. And I feel for those who need to do much in open/closed captions. I know some folks that are making it through that ok, but there are so many things you have to learn how to do to make that work ... not as optimal as one would like.

But ... in all ... I do prefer Pr/Ae/Au over Resolve. I do like the effect competition normally has on things, so ... may they both rush to please us, eh?

Neil

Report · Jan 04, 2018

I just switched to CC2018 from CS6 and find this slowness incredibly annoying. In CS6 the dialog pops up and you can make adjustments in the dialog while the audio peaks are calculated in the background. In CC2018 the dialog pops up but then freezes while the audio peaks are being calculated (UI becomes unresponsive.)

Report · Jan 05, 2018

Changes to Dolby Decoding and Encoding Support

The above change carries with it a memory leak that Adobe needs to fix. To work around it, you will need to import only a few clips at a time, let them conform, close and restart Premiere Pro to flush the memory, and then import the next group of clips.

Really long clips can be a problem, though.

Report · Jan 14, 2019

Jim_Simon wrote
Changes to Dolby Decoding and Encoding Support
The above change carries with it a memory leak that Adobe needs to fix. To work around it, you will need to import only a few clips at a time, let them conform, close and restart Premiere Pro to flush the memory, and then import the next group of clips.
Really long clips can be a problem, though.

Yep, experiencing the 'calculating' bug that is taking forever to work.. Never used to even take more than a second. It now takes around 1 minute of waiting for about an hour of footage... UPDATING should not seem like DOWNGRADING Adobe..

Report · Oct 04, 2019

Here we are over a year and half later with a few updates and the "calculating audio peaks" is still a huge pain. What's up Adobe?

Shane