Using proxies with multichannel audio

Report · Apr 14, 2020

When using source footage that has multichannel audio, Premeire - and AME to an extent - refuses to allow proxies. It will claim to need every audio channel to match, which AME will not do even on the right settings. Proxies make everything simpler on the video end, not the audio, so why should it require every audio channel to match anyway?

My workaround has been to load the file into the free version of Davinci Resolve, set it to 720p, and export using their DNxHD settings that will match the audio source exactly. I then have to attach this file as a proxy to the original in Premiere. It works, but it slows me down a lot.

Is there a better way to do this, or can Adobe please just allow me to use proxy footage with different audio?

Report · Apr 14, 2020

The current Proxy workflow requires matching audio channels. Some of the exporters in PPro/AME have limited audio channel support, which makes this challenging for Proxies. The QuickTime exporter supports the greatest amount of audio channel options, while also providing some good edit-friendly codecs such as DNxHR/HD, Apple ProRes and GoPro CineForm. These would be good options to use in PPro to create Proxies.

That said, please feel free to add your vote for improved audio channel support for Proxies in UserVoice. eg: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/35172364-proxy-media-and-fu...

Report · Apr 14, 2020

gotta say I spent weeks trying to make this work with some sort of sony footage with 8 tracks. Don't remember the exact format but it wasn't quicktime. Could never match a proxy setting to the source in terms of the audio. Just wasn't possible and I tried everything. Since the source material just had 2 channels of actual audio, I just transcoded to prores 422 hq with just 2 channels of audio and then made my proxies from that. Not ideal, but got me over the hump.

Report · Apr 15, 2020

Quicktime won't match to the audio source properly, which is strange considering most other video editing platforms can. Are there any "Adobe Official" ways to do this that actually work?

Report · May 11, 2020

Hey, are there any updates on this getting fixed? It's been multiple weeks and I still haven't heard anything.

Report · May 11, 2020

What's the camera, and what audio channels does it create? Just so perhaps someone here could offer assistance.

Neil

Report · May 11, 2020

I'm in the same boat. Anything requiring multitrack audio means I have to go use an external, competing video editing software to render out a proxy file. Sometimes, that doesn't work either. I'm left with 2K footage that takes anywhere from 10-60 seconds to load on my timeline without a proxy. I'm also editing files that run in excess of four, five, and even six hours long in duration.

Is there any way this could be categorized as 'higher importance' because the workflow I currently have to do for this kind of thing is far more complicated than it ought to be. I'm sure myself, lanzamanza, mgrenadier, and a lot of other people who work like this would very much appreciate some kind of way to implement a better solution than the one that currently exists. It would save a lot of time, headaches, and frustration going forward.

Report · May 11, 2020

This is a link to the UserVoice post with the most votes I can currently see on this ...

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/35172364-proxy-media-and-fu...

Yea, Premiere can be a right pain in trying to match audio channels with proxy media, and it doesn't allow any user over-rides.

Their system for getting things to the attention of the management is that UserVoice system. It goes directly to the engineering team, and yes, every post is read (I've talked with engineers that do so) ... and also every post is delivered in collated form to the upper managers who decide budgets.

Adobe lives by metrics, and this is their way to gather user-choice metrics.

Give them some ... go upvote this and others like it.

Neil

Report · May 11, 2020

Like Trent and Neil said, upvote the UserVoice, it's how you get the Adobe engineers and management's attention.

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/35172364-proxy-media-and-fu...

Report · Jun 25, 2020

Upvoted! I really wish Premiere allowed for pass-thru audio for proxy creation.

I'm working in Premiere 14.3.0. I have 4k clips shot on Canon C300 with 4 channels of audio: Ch1 is boom, Ch2 is lav, and Ch3-4 are junk. My original clips appear in the Project panel as 4 Channel mapped to 4 Mono. I right-click on the clips to Create Proxies and choose the ProRes Medium setting. The first strange thing is that, as the proxies are created , the clips switch to 4 Channel mapped to Adaptive. This doesn't work for me, so I map them back to Mono, and cut them into a sequence.

When I play the sequence with proxies toggled on, the audio channels are properly isolated. When I play the sequence with proxies toggled off, they aren't. Specifically, I get what sounds like a blend of all channels when I solo A1. The rest of the channels are blank.

The waveforms are also strange. With proxies toggled off, I see waveforms that accurately match the native audio, with Ch1 the loudest, Ch2, less loud, and Ch3 and Ch4 quite low. With proxies toggled on, I see uniform waveforms on all 4 channels — this despite the fact that Channels 2-4 play nothing when solo'ed.

I get the same result when I use the Cineform presets, and also when I take the trouble to create a custom ingest preset with 4 mono channels.

Am I doing something wrong?

Report · Jun 25, 2020

Here's what I wound up doing: I brought the clips into Resolve and transcoded them to ProRes 422 Proxy and "Same as Source" audio. I saved the clips to a separate Proxies folder. I used Mac OS's built-in Finder capability to rename all the proxies with "_Proxy" at the end. Then I batch-attached the original clips inside Premiere to the proxies. The audio now matches.

Report · Jun 25, 2020

Go to Jarle Leirpoll's website ... Premierepro.net

And use the contact form there to ask him ... he's the best production expert at this I know of.

Neil

Report · Nov 10, 2020

Thanks! I did get in touch with Jarle, who was very helpful. As it turns out, the ProRes proxy presets now automatically create proxies with a matching number of audio channels. (At least, they worked that way for my clips with 4 audio channels - not sure what would happen with 8.) So, farewell custom presets! I have continued to see the following bug: when trying to create proxies for clips brought in as multichannel mono, Premiere likes to change the first batch in the clip to adaptive. The fix is to detach the proxy, re-modify the audio channels of the clip, re-attach proxy. Sometimes you need to close the project and relaunch as well.

Report · Nov 10, 2020

Frustrating how complicated the sound can be. Often far more complicated than the video files. Glad you're working though, that's the main thing.

Neil

Report · Apr 21, 2021

Premiere likes to change the first batch in the clip to adaptive. The fix is to detach the proxy, re-modify the audio channels of the clip, re-attach proxy. Sometimes you need to close the project and relaunch as well.

By mike@citizenfilm.org

This fixed my issue perfectly! Coudnt understand why Adobe was interpreting footage with incorrect audio when every other software I used would show me my individual channels with their respective mics isolated. Thanks so much mike@citizenfilm.org

Report · Nov 10, 2022

Thanks, this worked but I spent hours trying to figure out a workaround until I saw your post!

Report · Mar 02, 2023

Wow finally. I think this is the answer to my problems. Never realized my proxies actually had the right number of audio channels. One question though, in your instructions what do you mean by re-modify the audio channels of the clip? Sorry if I'm being daft.

Report · Apr 13, 2023

I came across this problem today. 3 years and still no real multichannel proxy workflow?

Report · May 28, 2023

Hi @benjamins19660537 , what the re-modifing is referring to is that when you batch modify the audio channels some of the clips don't actually change the way you told them to, so when you switch on proxies some clips suddenly display the wrong audio channels in the timeline, so the fix is to go back to the project panel and detach the proxies from those particular clips that aren't showing the correct audio channels, then modify the audio channels again to how you wanted and then reattach the proxy. For some reason it won't work while the proxy is attached. I'm not sure if this has been fixed with the latest updates or not, but this at least was an issue and sometimes you needed detach the proxy and restart Premiere, then modify the audio channel and reattach the proxy. Hope that makes sense!

Report · Oct 05, 2023

Its 2023 and I got this exact same problem!!!Can't believe Adobe doesn't give a solution to this. However in my case I solved with FFMPEG, this are the lines of code that I use:

Extract the two audio tracks of the original Video

ffmpeg -i Original.mp4 -map a:0 -map a:1 -c:a copy -f matroska Original_Audio.mkv

Remove audio from Proxy

ffmpeg -i Proxy.mp4 -c:v copy -an Proxy_Without_Audio.mp4

Add the two audio tracks to the Proxy

ffmpeg -i Proxy_Without_Audio.mp4 -i Original_Audio.mkv -map 0 -map 1:a -c:v copy -c:a copy -shortest Final_Proxy.mp4

Basically it extracts the audio of the original footage and attatch it to the Proxy, this is done very fast because it doesn't re-encodes anything, literally it takes half a second to execute the line of code and get the new file.

I only use proxies when I am away from home and I have to work on my laptop instead of my desktop computer, also I work with files on Frame.io so my workflow is the next:

Whenver I'm away from home and get a new video, I connect throw remote desktop to my Desktop computer, download the files there and execute the "Extract the two audio tracks of the original Video" code for all the files. I then upload those MKV (Extracted audio) files to Frame.

On my laptop I download from Frame, the MKV files and then Frame has an option to download Proxies of the files that you have there, so instead of downloading the original Footage I download the Proxy that Frame.io provides. The proxies that Frame provides are 1/10 less heavy than the orignal files so this is perfect whenever I am in a place with bad internet. Also it helps a lot to not having to create the Proxies on your own.

To the proxy I downloaded, with the code "Remove audio from Proxy" I delete the audio track of the proxy, I do this because I didn´t find a way of deleting the original track of the Proxy and injecting the new audio tracks in the same step. So if anyone knows how to do it please share it with me!

Now that I have the Proxy without audio and the audio tracks in a MKV file, I use the "Add the two audio tracks to the Proxy" line of code to inject the audio tracks into the Proxy. And just like that I have a Proxy file that has the original audio tracks of the footage. When I attach this proxy in premiere it works flawlessly.

This is the fastest way I have found of doing it for my spécific case. The files I need for a video are few but long and heavy, so doing this for 3 or 5 files doesnt take too much time, but if someone needs it for many more files, it will take too much time to be worth it.

I'm sure there is a way to do it automatically like executing the code for each file in a folder or something like that but I'm not an expert on FFMPEG or coding, so I havent find a way yet. If I do I will update in here.

Report · Oct 15, 2023

October 2023 and still. Same issue.

I had heavy .MXF files from Canon C300 footage to downgrade. So, to save time, I created the proxies it in two different computers with Media Encoder. One of them only offered me .MXF as Proxy media... I tried and tested. Worked. So... some of them were ProRes .MOV and some others .MXF... aaaaand... when tried to link them in Premiere Pro... this error came up.

My solution was:
1) Delete all the Proxy files .MXF from the computer folder (not in Premiere Pro).
2) Rename Original files to the same name as the Proxies (eg: Original file name was A005C084_2209235M_IEC22.MXF ... and Proxy file name was A005C084_2209235M_IEC22_1.mxf ... in Mac you can select several files and batch replace names in Finder).
3) Link the files from Premiere Pro bin to the renamed Original files (you can do it in a batch also selecting many of them).
4) Now, since the files in Premiere Pro bin and in the computer's folder are the same, you didn't lose your edits in the Sequence/Timeline.
5) Create new Proxy files for the total needed. Try with one (1) file at first and see if it works. ProRess .MOV was my choice and it worked.

I couldn't find any other faster and safer solution for this issue. It's annoying, but it will work at the end.
I hope Adobe take note of this and rethink this restriction for Proxy files.

All the best, dear Editors!