Why is Premiere pro with 3rd party audio plugins (mostly waves) unusable?

Report · Jun 08, 2019

I use Premiere Pro for all my work and I cannot believe that Adobe insist on editors moving to a whole new app for audio mixing (audition) to make a final edit for every production you make - mainly becuase all features I need to make an audio mix is already in PRP - BUT things aren't working as smooth as they should considering PRP i sold as a "high end editing platform for professionals". The audio track mixer hasn't been updated since I don't know when and the plugins I use (and a whole lot of other professional audio engineers) will simply not run smooth in Premiere. It is so strange since it seems so very basic to e.g. get a small VST compressor to work smooth in a mixer. (and I can't believe the inserts in the mixer are "locked" so you cannot rearrange, copy or paste them after putting them in the mixer ???)

My top issue is my Waves 10.0 plugins. I have never had a nice experience with them in Premiere - but I still choose this sluggish performance over the very destructive way to hop over to Audition and make my audio mix there.

I use Premiere Pro 2019 v13.1.2 and Waves 10.0.0.16 and the things that not work is simply changing the parameters inside of the plugin. When dragging let's say the threshold of a compressor the plugin won't respond until I let go of the knob and then it can be way off what I intended - and it has been like this with every version of PRP and every version of Waves I've come across last 5 years. It is in other words unusable BUT I still choose these plugins over Audition since I still manually can type the values I want and let's face it it's not that many parameters to work with so it should be easy to build a PRP version that can handle these plugins.

And yes - waves plugins are way better than to ones included with Premiere. I just don't find the compressors, EQs etc. good enough to value them over sluggish performance in my Waves plugins. Please add the simple code to PRP to make third party audio plugins run smooth. It is such a basic thing - even completely free video editors I've tested handle these plugins better than PRP.

I have considered moving to Davinci Resolve - when testing it for 1hour I was amazed how smooth even the editing was compared to Premiere, not to mention how well my waves plugins worked, and it's unbelievable that PRP is so slow in so many sections considering how much I pay for the software every year.

Let me know If I'm missing out on something about why my waves plugins don't work.

My Specs:

Windows 10 64bit

1x512gb SSD for System

4x4tb Raid 0 HDD for Media

1x1tb NVMe M.2 for Cache

1x4tb SSD for Proxy

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

Report · May 04, 2022

Because it doesn't make sense to change application and be forced to lock the edit simply to put 1 audio compressor on 1 track.

Report · May 04, 2022

Because it doesn't make sense to change application and be forced to lock the edit simply to put 1 audio compressor on 1 track.

Report · May 04, 2022

I understand the frustrations, especially working so poorly with plugins. Please post that over on their Premiere Pro UserVoice page, as 1) everthing posted there is logged into the engineer's Slack system manually by an engineer, routed to the right part of the team, and ... more importantly but not understood by most users! ...all posts to that system are collated and passed up above the engineers to the all-important M&E ... marketing & experience ... staffers, who are the ones with overall control of budgets & such.

As to current processes, there are a couple different ways you can port audio to Audition & back. Each works differently, different implications. I don't know how well you understand them, maybe better than me. If you've a question on that, someone like " Steve G " over on the Audition forum can give better detailed, practical professional-work advice.

And the Audition people actually do the entire sound section for Pr, Au, Ae ... they don't have a separate sound group in each app.

From my practical experience, I've not ever "locked" for doing anything in Audition, nor after. So ... well, you're maybe doing things I've not, but I've both recut sections of timeline after Audition work, and redone some of the areas withing Premiere. And sent back to Audition for further work, with all controls still available for changes.

Neil