Why Render Unnecessary Audio Previews?

[Rowan!]

For years now, I've lived with Premiere Pro rendering "previews" of all the audio files in the entire timeline when I simply want to output just a short work area, but why? I don't get this behavior!

I'm working on a 90 minute film but when I export a short work area I have to either wait a massive amount of time for Rendering Required Audio Files that are not in the work area to finish or create a subsequence of that work area, which renders very fast (but that's a multistep workaround).

Image shows a 1 min 38 sec work area with about 75 audio clips to create previews of 2500 audio clips requiring an hour.

Seems like Rendering Audio Previews could be done in the background rather than waiting until the moment a quick render of a litle work area is needed.

I've lived with this weird, annoying, time-suck for years.

Anyone know why?

[Jeff Bugbee]

I'm trying to replicate this issue but I haven't been able to. What export settings are you using?

I've tried this and it renders only my work bar, and very quickly. 

[Rowan!]

Hi Jeff...

Where this happens is with File -> Export Media. Specifically...

In the Export panel, I select how I want it to render out, then only after I click Start does the modal window display the exceptionally long Rendering Required Audio Previews as shown in my original post. (Your screenshot of Sequence -> Render Entire Work Area is not where the issue is.)

The screenshot I've included with my reply here shows the rendering settings to answer your question about settings but I can tell you from past experience, it doesn't matter what the audio settings are.

I can understand PP needing to render out audio but why does it need to include thousands of audio files that are not part of the work area?? That's what makes no sense.

[Jeff Bugbee]

This is a guess: but are those clips you are rendering out part of much, much larger original files? For example, if you have an hour video, but only need 5 seconds. When you render, perhaps it has to render the entire file due to the source codec, or perhaps the destination one. Or it could simply be a limitation of Premiere. Like I said, I can't replicate this, but I'm not using the same files/codecs as you, which is why I suspect it may be something specific to those files.

[Rowan!]

I can tell you the video files are all image sequences (Blackmagic DNGs) and the editor linked the production audio files to each video file. But, as mentioned, if I make a subsequence of the work area, Premiere renders that out virtually instanteously, no problem. It's when the work area sits in the 90 minute timeline that it needs to spend an hour creating the audio previews, even if I'm rendering out only the video (audio off).

Once all these many previews are created then it does render out just as quickly from the timeline as it does from a subsequence of the same work area...and that's all I know. (I tested custom output vs Match Source and that also didn't matter.)

[Jeff Bugbee]

Can you give any more detail on these audio files? Are these 45+ minute audio files? Or smaller clips? Do they have a lot of audio effects added to them within Premiere?

[Rowan!]

I don't think they have any FX added but most are "merged" and the editor was using the multicam features to select the shot (but that would be for the video tracks, obvs). They're all production audio files, meaning the Sound Recordist recorded each clip for each shot, so they really short; most a few seconds long. None are more than a couple minutes but that's usual. 

Merged is what I see on most of the audio files because the editor linked the audio to the multicam video clips.

[mickfir]

Yeah this happens to me all the time. Since I started with Premiere 10 years ago. Multiple computers and operating systems. Sorry kid. It's another one of those absolutely disgraceful, infuriating travesties of adobe software. The so-called "community Expert" trying to help you has never seen this issue because they have never edited a project of the size and complexity wherein the issue inevitable arises. It is no a bug. It has been a part of Premiere Pro from the beginning. One of the many festering sores on a the overpriced corps of adobe software.   Adobe has gone insane focusing on garbage Ai while neglecting to fix these basic issues that have plagued users for years.  

[Remote Index]

Hello Rowan!

This is a common experience, and it’s been reported before:

2018

2021

2022

Personally I feel that audio renders are kind of ignored in the Premiere Pro interface in a way that video renders are not. It suggests a kind of embarrassment on the part of the software designers that audio has to be rendered sometimes. The result is that the user has no control over audio renders, and it also leads to the export render experience you’ve outlined.

In 2019 I suggested improvements around audio renders. (This suggested was wiped when the old user voice forum was wiped. Make of that what you will. Reference to the post remains here.) The suggestion did elicit a response from an Adobe employee, but as we know nothing changed.

The substance of my suggestion was that audio renders should be indicated and managed in the timeline in the same way that video renders are (green, yellow, red indicators in time). If they were, it would be more apparent what needed to be rendered, and it would be more apparent when Premiere Pro was losing renders and having to re-render them. In other words, the management of audio renders would have to be cleaned up.

My experience has been that software design issues are usually shrugged off by Adobe unless they are related to new features; this is particularly true around audio. You can despair. Or maybe upvote.

Moderators: suggesting this be moved to ideas

@Kevin-Monahan 

R.

[Joost van der Hoeven]

Hello @Rowan! Are your audio tracks nested or come from a MultiTrack? I've only experienced this extreme long audio rendertimes in these cases, and suggest the developers to have a look at this.

[Rowan!]

Thanks for your detailed response. The absurd amount of time wasted on these audio renders is my top reason for eyeing Resolve when I have the time.

The last few updates to PrPro have made it useable again: Faster timeline playback (why can audio play back in the timeline but requires encoding when exporting, one might ask), much more stable, and various new features that are worthwhile.

At NAB 2024, I spoke with an engineer about this issue and have not followed up but that conversation was encouraging that someone was looking into it.

[Rowan!]

Not nested but most clips are multicam with synced audio (i.e., synced with the separately recorded production audio).

For the sake of completeness, I will also mention all the video clips are sequential raw files (Blackmagic Cinema .dng files). Not sure how or even why that would relate, but thought I’d mention it.

[Joost van der Hoeven]

Mutlicam sequences are nests. What codec is are the nested/multicam audio files in? AAC?

[Remote Index]

@Joost van der Hoeven 

"Mutlicam sequences are nests. "

An important point of correction ... multicam sequences are similar to nests, but as should be evident from the (relatively new) setting toggle "Multi-Camera Follows Nest Setting" (implimented in part in reaction to this thread and others), multi-cam sequences are not nests (though they behave like nests in certain ways). If they were nests, they would not require a setting to behave like nests.

From the second link:

The truth is that Multi-Cam clips are not nests, although they have behaved similarly to nests since we utilize the sequence structure to build them, and the sequence foundation gives us a great deal of flexibility for modifying Multi-Cam clips easily in the form of a sequence. - Ben Isler, Adobe Employee

From the first link:

You'll note that Ben Isler is always careful to indicate that multi-cam clips can be be added to a sequence "as nests (multi-cam)" ie. they are not just "nests", they're "nests (multi-cam)"

R.

[Rowan!]

From what I see, the Multicam clips with synced audio have 4 tracks of audio.
Two are 24-bit WAV (waveform) audio files from the camera.

Then the other 2 tracks (sometimes 3) are synced from the production audio (external) and the properties panel says (for one example clip):
Source Audio Format: 48000 Hz - 24-bit - Stereo
Project Audio Format: 48000 Hz - 32 bit floating point - Stereo
Total Duration: 00:00:39:00

The basic answer is that all the audio clips are .WAV files.
I’m not the original editor but do have access to the timeline, so my expertise is limited.

[Joost van der Hoeven]

Ok @Remote Index I stand corrected for simplifying things. But still the audio is in a nest-like source, hence my question.