Audio drops out while reviewing Premiere timeline

[charlese15399874]

I’m having an issue in Premiere pro where the audio levels drop randomly to a whisper while video runs normally.  I’m working on a 96 minute timeline with at most a couple tracks of video, an adjustment layer with Lumetri corrections, and two or three audio tracks.  Resolution is 1080 p .MXF shot on a Sony FS5 and the video plays flawlessly at full res. Audio dropping out is all attached to MXF video.  My computer is a 2017 ten core imac pro with 64GB of ram. I just updated my operating system to Catalina but the problem was there when I ran High Sierra. My Premiere Pro version is the latest: 14.3.0 (Build 38) The project is on an ssd drive reading and writing at about 420 MB/s.  Normally I can edit DCI 4k footage at full resolution on this machine.  I have tried deleting my cache, closing Premiere and restarting the iMac; that appeared to help for a while but basically the occurrences are completely erratic and it can be fine for hours but then today while reviewing the timeline with someone it was impossible to view the film. Now the audio has come back and levels are correct again. 

Any solutions? 

[JOHN MONDO]

Yeah - I've seen this, but usually only when the computer is struggling to keep up. Try rendering your audio only, see if it resolves the issue. FWIW I've seen on a PC, so it's not just a Mac thing. In my case pretty sure the audio dropped completely. Also seen things like the timeline won't stop playing when you hit the space bar until 10 seconds later etc. You could also try assigning PP more RAM. I have mine assigned at 11GB with 5 reserved for other apps

[Ann Bens]

Try setting the latency in the audio hardware preferences to a higher number

[charlese15399874]

Thanks for the idea. I put this project aside for a couple weeks and now I’m trying to solve the issue again. In audio hardware preferences I checked the I/O buffer size, is that what you mean by the latency? I had it set to 2048 which should be the max latency yesterday and the problem surfaced a lot. I set it back to 512 which is the default to try that. I ran through my timeline for about ten minutes and then when transitioning clips the audio dropped out; not entirely just to a whisper. At the next clip it was back. I went back to the beginning of the same clip and the issue was gone.  It happens at the transition between two clips especially when they are on different tracks.  I have a couple other short projects going as well and this issue hasn’t happened with them. So it seems to be specific to this project which has numerous builds and timelines.  I’m about at picture lock and want to work on the audio in Audition. I’m wondering if the problem will persist and also whether I can export the project without there being holes in the sound track. 

[JOHN MONDO]

Are these audio or video transitions you're referring to?