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Participating Frequently
January 24, 2023
Open for Voting

Display audio waveforms for nested audio clips

  • January 24, 2023
  • 20 replies
  • 5227 views
Display audio waveforms for nested audio clips

20 replies

EALS
Inspiring
January 24, 2023
Nested sequences shows audio off or flat curve. It is weird and not useful.
Participating Frequently
January 24, 2023
Please. Random waveforms sometimes show. How is this a feature request and not a bug? Maybe I'm missing something?
hellopaul4
Inspiring
January 24, 2023
I know it's possible to show the audio waveforms of nested clips if you do a Sequence > Render Audio, but why can't Premiere auto-render the audio in the background when it's idle?
New Participant
January 24, 2023
Why is this still not a feature? It seems like a basic fix. Rendering things out and replacing them for a visual reference is an ***-backwards workflow.
richardh38606576
Participating Frequently
January 24, 2023
This is a very annoying problem for me as I'm using nests so that I can add or tweak audio & video effects globally on the raw footage later after I finish cutting it. (But I need to see the waveforms to make edits!).

Even with a completely vanilla nest (just video + linked audio within), clips referencing the nested sequence will sometimes show waveforms (see left in nest.PNG) and sometimes not (see right in nest.PNG) - seemingly at random (or because Premiere's memory allocation for audio is capped maybe?). Very occasionally, zooming the timeline or widening the audio track will cause the waveforms to appear (or disappear).

Render and Replace on the descendant audio clip(s) works but leaves my workflow useless as any further changes to the original nest will no longer be inherited by my final audio.

BUT: One workaround I've found which you might find useful is to duplicate your nest clip (hold alt + shift and drag to a new track), render & replace and disable that, and use it as a visual reference for cuts you make to the non-waveform nest audio that you're working with (see rendered nest.PNG).
Inspiring
January 24, 2023
My nest for a feature was going just fine and I was matching M,E, &D stems to the master edit. Now the nest waveforms have just plain disappeared. The only change? I decided to render all audio because stems were slipping regularly against the recut.

Now stems are going way out of synch and suddenly there's no reference waveforms.

AMENDED JULY 2020- SYNCH SLIPPAGE NOTE
Easy to blame Premiere Pro, but wrong. Turns out slippage came from improper transfer of true 24-frame audio @96K 24-bit into 23.98 WAV files. 23.98 is not "just 24 fps"-- it's fractional because the math accommodates the obsolete interlaced video format.

It's not 1:1@ 24 frames, or "universal 24P" as the Avid guys envisioned so many years ago and which more producers are generating from All-I camera codecs. We have come full circle- digital video is now digital FILM. But old audio transfers at fractional frame rates will definitely slip in 24P timelines. You'll hear it go out against reference audio every ten seconds.

I know, I had to resynch 5 feature D-M-E stems by hand because I didn't realize until 4/5 through that the slip error was not in Premiere and could have been corrected by exporting the fractional tracks as new WAV files at 24 fps. *DOHHH*
-Lor -
Inspiring
January 24, 2023
Even worse, in the latest version of Premiere Pro, dragging the front edge of a nested sequence to trim the selection forward on the timeline causes the rendered audio waveform for that layer to move backwards independently of the layer. It makes no sense, and it makes it impossible to work with.
Participating Frequently
January 24, 2023
This is my second post on this thread. This is still an issue. Audio on nested clips, that came from the same nested sequence, do not consistently display waveforms. In the screenshot below I have several clips from the same nested sequence. There are four tracks of audio from two clips (two angles of an interview) but only one track is not muted. Under these conditions the waveform is supposed to display in the nested sequence when you drop this nest into another timeline. As you can see all the clips from this nested sequence are displaying the waveforms except the last clip. The happens to me all the time when I sync two cameras from an interview. There doesn't seem to be any logic to which clips it will display audio from and which ones it won't. Aggravating when you are trying to do cutting based on audio (interviews).

After I rendered audio on the pictured timeline the waveforms on two more clips DISAPPEARED. Yes, truly. I am so tired of this issue.

I am willing to do a screen share with an Adobe staff person to demonstrate the issue.
Known Participant
January 24, 2023
Some more flexibility here would be great. It appears that the way it works now is that audio for the *entire* nested sequence is rendered (and you have no other choice), even if it's trimmed to only use a few seconds of it. This helps you extend the clip and not have to generate new waveform/peaks (a good thing), but for a really long nested sequence (extended multiclip seq, say) you may be forced into a several-minute render to see any peaks.
DrTc
Inspiring
January 24, 2023
Even after Rendering Audio, waveform appears on one nested sequence and not on another...