Weird Premiere CC audio render issue. Am I alone?

[Luke Kokinos]

I shot a feature on my R1. My audio team made some mistakes and used a Tascam DR-40 for most of a film, when not caturing to the camera. So as the editor and sound guy, I went through the audio and applied some lowpass, EQ, ect. to try and compensate for the lower performing recorder. Since then, I have had endless problems with the audio. Regardless of how many times I render the audio, every clip starts off really muddy and quiet, and then about 2-3 seconds in, clicks up to proper volume. When I export, I get a really annoying hissing for the first 2-3 seconds of every sound clip. I am trying to finalize audio, and this is pissing me off.

I read about similar issues on Adobe's forums, but I'm wondering if anyone here has experienced this exact problem.

Assuming I can't fix it, is there a program I could import my project into and finish there? Something maybe a bit more stable than CC?

 

[Simon Dunne]

First off, which version of Premiere are you using? Secondly, when you imported your audio, is it 32bit, or did premiere conform it and make a load of CFA files? If the latter, delete all those CFA files, close the project, restart, then it should make them from scratch and 9 time out of 10, that fixes the issue. Deffo upgrade to CC though, bugs like these when reported always get attention.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I shot a feature on my R1. My audio team made some mistakes and used a Tascam DR-40 for most of a film, when not caturing to the camera. So as the editor and sound guy, I went through the audio and applied some lowpass, EQ, ect. to try and compensate for the lower performing recorder. Since then, I have had endless problems with the audio. Regardless of how many times I render the audio, every clip starts off really muddy and quiet, and then about 2-3 seconds in, clicks up to proper volume. When I export, I get a really annoying hissing for the first 2-3 seconds of every sound clip. I am trying to finalize audio, and this is pissing me off.

I mean no disrespect, but: hire a professional sound mixer to edit and clean up your sound for you. Don't try to do it within an editing program. You don't have the tools or experience to do this correctly, and it will kill you once the film is screened for an audience.

It may well be possible that some (or most) of the sound may have to be redone -- ADR'd -- in post. Or it may be possible a lot of it can be salvaged. There are so many variables, it's hard to predict.

An experienced sound mixer will have a quiet room, reasonable loudspeakers in the exact correct position, along with the ability to noise reduce and process the sound for a consistent, even result that tells the story and makes every line perfectly audible. But so much depends on where the microphone was during production, I can't say how much good or bad they could do. I can say that one of the hallmarks of incompetent amateurish films is the sound. I'll turn a movie off 2 minutes in if I have to struggle to figure out the dialogue. Distributors are even more harsh.

The other thing I frequently tell filmmakers is that the time to get a good post person involved is prior to production, not afterward. The post supervisor can warn you when you're about to drive off a cliff (so to speak) and stop mistakes before they become a real problem. Shooting without a timecode audio recorder would be high on that list, at least to me.

 

[Luke Kokinos]

I had the audio sounding the way I needed it to. Hiring is out of the question at this time, because I simply do not make films with that kind of budget, however, I have actual audio enthusiasts involved in upcoming projects. I simply need to know what is going on with CC (latest version, ran software updates and no luck), so I can get my audio sounding the way I had it before all these bugs caught up with me.

Don't get me wrong, I hate dealing with audio, and I'm not a pro, but I'm not stupid, and my sound is not bad enough to ruin the movie.

Always learning from mistakes, and making what I can of every problem as it occurs.

 

[Luke Kokinos]

Deleting render cache seemed to be effective. Thank you.

(you can delete this thread if you like)