Inspiring

Question

Rules concerning Audio Previews?

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
November 20, 2016
4 replies
5493 views

Large project. Many multi-track sequences being combined into new sequences. Many audio layers.

I've found that that the project is unworkable if I do not have Audio Previews rendered.... if I'm working on a complex sequence then PPro will take a couple minutes to respond to most commands UNLESS the Audio Preview for that sequence has been pre-rendered. (In which case it is perfectly responsive.)

So maintaining pre-rendered audio previews is very important to me. It can take anywhere between 3h and 8h to re-render Audio Previews in my more complex sequences.

When stepping away from machine, I'll often render fresh Audio Preview so that I'm not evolving (by editing) too far away from last Audio Preview and am not stuck waiting on PPro to render a new one when I'm wanting to edit.

Something happened with me editing yesterday, that I sit down at my PC this morning and am once again faced with no Audio Preview for my sequence that I'd like to edit. I am presently re-rendering it and can not work... won't be able to work for hours now.

(Estimated Time Left is 88 hours... that'll come down to ~6h I imagine as starting estimates are usually high. But it is always a long process.)

Would love to know all the reasons Audio Previews might need to be re-generated. So I know what to avoid, or at least things to avoid doing without following them up with me telling PPro to re-render Audio Previews for sequences I'm working on.

I THINK what I did wrong yesterday was "File - Save As" and increment the file name. That's the only unusual thing I did which I don't do every single work session. So maybe that caused it? But I'd like to heard someone tell me that, yes, indeed Saving-As a new file name causes PPro to disassociate all existing Audio Preview data.

But I'm sure I've also done that many times (my filename is at v656) without losing Audio Preview every-single-time.

Have checked Event Log to make sure my hard drives didn't magically disconnect and re-connect during the night.

The "P" drive where I keep all my "Adobe Scratch Audio/Video Previews" is still loaded with data... that's a 16TB volume mostly full of data but with 4TB still free.

I can see the P drive's latest folder...

TR2012 656.PRV

...being filled with data now. It is at 12 GB and climbing.

Presumably it will be filled enough to match...

TR2012 655.PRV

...which contains 806 GB.

Opening an older version of the project does not let PPro see those Audio Previews! (Not that I want to lose my changes but I'm just messing around trying to understand what makes PPro tick on this.)

The Audio Previews exist! The P drive is chock-full of data.

I thought PPro continually leveraged Audio Previews saved under previous file names. Is that wrong and I should never-ever be updating my file name every week?

I mean those times I tried deleting older folders named after older versions of the project, then PPro notices... that's when I could trust no sequences could be responsively edited without re-rendering Audio Previews for them.

What are the internal rules regarding Audio Previews PPro is following?

Is there any way to tell it... hey HERE are the Audio Previews you are looking for. Because it looks like I'm re-building them from scratch today.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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Gordon James McDowellAuthor

Inspiring

With Adobe tech monitoring demonstrated this problem with simplified copy of my project. Then (together) we created a project from scratch in PPro2017.0.1. Multi-track sequences used as multi-cam (multi-audio). Rendered audio. CLOSING the project not enough, must CLOSE PPro itself. But then closing and opening PPro showed the render was forgotten.

Tech then tried this in PPro2015 and saw behavior is different (it remembered the rendered audio).

So this has been confirmed and I assume Adobe will be able to address in future update or some other means.

Marking as SOLVED since now Adobe is aware of issue.

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Gordon James McDowellAuthor

Inspiring

Called Adobe tech support. Fellow reset some of my preferences and enabled Intel H.264 decoding and GPU/CUDA rendering. He didn't say that would address the issue (GPU vs CPU) but I should try it for performance reasons.

Because I'd given up on GPU due to stability issues back in PPro2015, and not tried it since, am happy to give that a shot. Windows has updated since PPro2015. NVIDIA drivers have updated a few times. So quite likely GPU will help make the editing snappier.

However, the Audio Preview problem still persists.

Yes, I'll call tech support again to continue trying to resolve this. But I'm hoping anyone who either does NOT experience this or DOES experience this can weigh in.

Again, in a nutshell, closing PPro and re-opening PPro causes it to forget that I've rendered Audio Previews for my sequences. So right now instead of editing I'm looking at this...

Rendering: 11.41%

Estimated Time Left: 21:28:00

Render Started 6:36:12 AM, 2016-12-09

Time Elapsed 02:48:39

Free Disk Space: 6.22 TB

That ETL is too high... it'll get about 1/2 and then speed up (for some reason). But it will still take all working day.

Since the tech updated my preferences I've opened/closed PPro twice, and it forgot my Audio Preview both times... just like it has been ever since I successfully migrated from PPro2015 to PPro2017.

Maybe it was happening in PPro2015 all along, and it was just crashing all the time and I couldn't get a sense of all the problems. PPro2017 is more stable. It rarely crashes (relative to PPro2015). But losing Audio Previews makes every crash a really big deal.

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Gordon James McDowellAuthor

Inspiring

Have un-done both the GPU enabling and the h.264 Intel support (2 separate settings) enabled by Adobe. The GPU/CUDA led to me unable to get a visual in timeline when editing. That's why I disabled it back in PPro 2015.

And because PPro is constantly becoming non-responsive in my current sequence, I also disabled the h.264 Intel support just to see if that would help. No discernible difference.

So Audio Preview rendering issue persists. And I find I can't export my sequence without PPro freezing (whether Queue or Export). It stops at 0%.

I can "work" by rendering for 8 hours and editing the sequence... but I'm suddenly worried all my efforts will get stuck in a project that can't be exported.

I've tried to split the sequence by duplicating it (or trying to copy/paste the sequence) freezes PPro.

By deleting half the content in the sequence (not sure I have any way to recover it if I do) then it will Export. So I'll try delete the other half and see if same. But if it is just the size/complexity of sequence which is an issue and I can't split it then I'm not sure how to proceed. Deleting half the sequence doesn't matter. It still freezes on 0% encoding... encoding to uncompressed QT.

Maybe if there was a split-sequence-at-cursor command? But I do not believe that exists. One needs to make the project bigger (by duplicating sequence) in order to fragment any sequence (by deleting start-of from one and end-of from the other sequence). Please tell me if I'm wrong.

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Gordon James McDowellAuthor

Inspiring

I've determined there are 2 issues I'm dealing with here...

One being Audio Preview being forgotten. That seemed to kick in soon as I migrated to PPro2017.0.1 (although i didn't immediately notice).

The other being a 3rd party audio plugin iZotope RX5 De-noise... there's some sort of limit to how many instances can be used.

My inability to split the sequence is probably 100% due to iZotope.

Because to split it I first need to duplicate it, and that duplication would created 100s more instances of iZotope audio filter.

I have removed a dozen instances from a sequence and am now attempting to export audio, something I've become unable to do.

But, in regards to the first problem, the Audio Preview being forgotten by PPro, I did render audio preview for a sequence which does not use iZotope RX5 and closed PPro and re-opened PPro and the render was forgotten.

So I'm hoping to hear from Adobe that either they can confirm Audio Previews disappear or that they can not replicate this.

I can't use my Mac/PC CC license abilities to test this on a non-iZotope box (which would be my Mac) because it is a measly little 6GB-RAM laptop with only USB2 I/O. PPro still wants to generate many TBs of audio preview data, even if I try open a project file in total absence of media data... to troubleshoot in parallel with me trying to work I'd like a temporary license to get PPro going on another PC so I can compare.

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Gordon James McDowellAuthor

Inspiring

Have submitted a Bug Report.

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Gordon James McDowellAuthor

Inspiring

Problems have continued. PPro occasionally crashes. It is generally more stable when I'm editing with shorter sequences, and when I do not edit a sequence with un-rendered audio. However, nothing appears to 100% address the crashing and I do have to make the process of re-opening a project as fast as possible... and the biggest time-sink there is that PPro doesn't seem to realize Audio Preview has already been rendered for a sequence.

I already followed these steps...

FAQ: How to clean media cache files

...and now have been monitoring the size of Audio Preview folder to see if PPro keeps growing it forever, or even deleting files.

My P: drive (for audio + video previews) is a 16TB volume consisting of 2x 8TB drives which have been extended together by Windows. (This is a fairly recent change but has not impacted anything I'm reporting except that I've got more free space... I was worried PPro was causing me this grief before it thought I was running out of space.)

Because I recently cleaned my media cache files, I've gone from using 12TB to 2TB. So lots of free space... there's lots of sequences in the project I have **not** created Audio Preview for, and if I created them all then I expect I'd be back where I was before needing my very large P: volume.

Presently, as I try to edit and also figure out what is going on here, I've got 3 sequences I'm working with, and they're only 10m each. They're very deep, and reference many multi-track sequences with many tracks of audio... but still they're only 30m in total. So between such a large volume (and lots of free space on every drive for a cache) and such short sequences I can't imagine why PPro would require I re-render audio unless there's a bug.

In my experience, telling PPro to Render Audio takes no time at all if it has already been rendered. And if there's a minor change then it only seems to render the delta (so busy for minutes not hours).

And between PPro crashing, this is how PPro acts... after successfully rendering a sequence, PPro does indeed know that sequence is rendered. And me making changes (me working and editing) results in very brief Render Audio Preview. It is after I either Close PPro or PPro crashes that it all seems forgotten.

After PPro crashes here is what I'm seeing...

P:\Adobe Premiere Pro Audio Previews

533 GB of which is in TR2016 658.PRV folder (that is project file name I am working with).

Reloading PPro with the project does NOT change that folder size. (All other Audio Preview cache folders remain same size and never update their files... that data is for other sequences that I am not editing or rendering audio for.)

PPro is now no longer very responsive. Clicking on the timeline takes many seconds to register and respond. PPro is very crash-prone in this state because clicking ahead before PPro has caught up can result in a crash. Plus it is just too slow to do any work. So I **must** render audio.

I do so.

Now TR2016 658.PRV folder changes size **slightly** over new few hours as PPro renders the sequence's audio preview. Lowest I see it dip down to is 531 GB.

And it seems to be deleting files and re-creating them again.

So it dips down **slightly** as a particular file is deleted, and then goes back up to 533 GB as any one particular cache file is re-rendered.

176 files, 45 GB files in TR2016 658.PRV are newer (based on date created which is later than when I triggered Audio Preview).

So PPro does not realize this sequence already has 176 files totalling 45 GB in size on that P: drive. One-by-one it deletes them and re-creates them. And I can not work until it finishes this process.

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Gordon James McDowellAuthor

Inspiring

PPro crashed due to low-level exception when I tried to adjust duration of a video clip.

Re-opening to project took about 15 minutes.

However, I can not work because 20 minutes ago PPro recognized that I'd created Audio Previews for my sequences.

Now that I've re-loaded it, it no longer does.

That's HOURS i need to wait until the sequence (at the very least the one I'm working on) audio is re-rendered again.

I'll call Adobe tech support on this. Fine. No one at Adobe wanted to try tackle this in the forum huh?

While 2017 is clearly a step forward overall, I do need PPro to remember my Audio Previews. This is a bug. Please fix this bug, or tell me you are aware of it and working on it. I've submitted a bug report... never any word back from submitting those.

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excited_Genie16B8

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