Regenerating individual waveforms?

[mjshade]

Running 14.0 on an iMac pro running Catalina 10.15.5, 10 cores, 128 GB ram.

I'm editing a feature documentary with more than 20,000 media assets, 30+TB of footage. 

I periodically have to trash my cache folders, which is the only way to resolve playback issues I have. It takes at least 24 hours for Premiere to regenerate all of the media cache files. This is not a hardware issue, see specs above.

Sometimes Premiere still doesn't properly generate waveforms for some of my clips - the clips are just missing them on the timeline. Clicking "generate audio waveform" doesn't work. It would create media management headaches for me to rename files and relink them just to trick Premiere into generating a waveform for them. 

So, my question: is there a way to force Premiere to regenerate a waveform for an individual clip? If not, is there a way of identifying the cache files associated with a clip so they can be deleted, rather than having to delete everything? 

[R Neil Haugen]

For that project, I think it would be vastly to your benefit to have been using the Productions process, which is precisely designed to cut out the poor performance of massive single project work. It's what their Hollywood department uses with all major features, been heavily tested through several of them.

Premiere Pro Productions Introduction

Using Productions in Premiere Pro

Neil

[mjshade]

Hello,

Thanks for your reply. I will note that for next time. 

Is there a way to force Premiere to regenerate a waveform for an individual clip? If not, is there a way of identifying the cache files associated with a clip so they can be deleted, rather than having to delete everything? 

[Averdahl]

No, there is no way to re-generate audio waveforms. But, if you close the project and use Finder to search for all .pek files you can delete only the .pek files. That will solve some of the audio waveforms. For media that requires Conforming you need to delete the .cfa files as well. Next time you open the project the audio waveforms will be re-generated.

Start with deleting the .pek files and open the project and see if that did the trick. Those are re-created quite fast. If you delete the .cfa files as well it will indeed take time for everything to be ready to go, so hopefully deleting the .pek files were enough to fix it.

Yes, you can identify the files. If i import a file named VTS_02_1.VOB the .cfa file is named VTS_02_1.VOB 48000.cfa and the pek file is named VTS_02_1.VOB 48000.pek.

To speed up things i find it valuable to go to Edit > Preferences > Audio and un-check Automatic audio waveform generation. Now no audio waveforms will be created unless the source file is Conformed, or when you playback the clip, or when you select the file and force Premiere Pro to generate waveforms for the whole file by going to Clip > Generate Audio Waveform. Mind you that unchecking this should be done in a separate project since once the re-generating begins changing this setting won´t do nothing.

[mjshade]

Thanks! I appreciate your detailed response. 

Looks like deleting the .pek files and then attempting to regenerate them using the "Generate Audio Waveform" command doesn't work, sadly. Hopefully it will work when I reload my project (as you suggested), but that's a time-consuming experiment for another time. 

[salvo34]

I don't use PPro much, and what I use is a very old version.

What I remember about individual clips ( often linked to other clips and sound clips ) is that I would select the clips I think are messed up ( unlink the other stuff that's not messed up, temporarily ) and then ( with that part selected ) RENDER it.   That usually was fast even when I had 3 hour long feature film documentary work in progress, like THE HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA .

[salvo34]

ps.

no, the cache files are a secret file that you cannot 'link' manually to a specific clip or section of timeline.

You have to deal with the horses mouth, not his spiritual secret essence, which otherwise would be stolen by other software companies to duplicate ( steal ) the programming.