• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Dual System Audio and Merged Clips Headache

  Posted by Bob Pierce on September 18, 2013 at 12:40 pm

  I’m using plural eyes to sync my 5D interview footage with audio, which comes into premiere as a sequence. I then log the interviews by chopping up the clips in the sequence into shorter clips which are then dragged into a bin (1 at a time only – premiere will not allow multiple clips to be moved into a bin) which I then need to be merged. I merge the clips, then type some notes in the “description” field.

  Hours later my interviews are logged and now I’m dragging clips into the timeline for editing. Then things get flaky. If I try to then drag these merged clips into a bin (or anywhere in the project window) Premiere refuses. Also, in one instance, an entire interview logged this way got completely fouled up – no video or audio was present in the bin. Even the timecode indications were scrambled.

  Am I the only one having this issue? I’d be very interested to hear other folk’s way of logging projects such as this.

  Thanks!
  Bob Pierce

  Director of Photography • Editor
  http://www.lightstreamassociates.com

  Joe Shapiro replied 10 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Bob Pierce

  September 19, 2013 at 11:20 pm

  In addition to the flakiness of the merged clips, there’s a bunch of documented limitations to Merged clips which pretty much should rule them out as a method of working with dual system audio. The list below is directly from the user manual. When it says a merged clip cannot be “adjusted” that includes adding or adjusting a filter. Be forewarned.

  The only solution I’ve come up with is something suggested by a Cow user: have Pluraleyes copy the media to create all new self contained clips. Obviously, not an ideal solution.

  
  Merged Clips limitations
  The Replace Footage command does not work.

  Attaching Adobe Story scripts, and then analyzing speech to text is not supported.

  Full audio channel mapping control in the merged clip is not supported.
  Merged clip audio results in mono track audio only.Final Cut Pro XML and AAF interchange formats are not supported.

  Auto-sync using audio waveforms, free-run timecode, time-of-day timecode, AUX timecode, or separate audio timecode is not supported.
  Reveal in Adobe Bridge is not supported.

  Once created, the merged clip cannot be re-synchronized, or adjusted. You must make a new merged clip.

  Adjusting contents of a merged clip is not supported. However, if a particular component clip is deleted, the merged clip may be relinked.

  Merged clips or parts of previously merged clips cannt be used to remerge or make a new merged clip. Only component clips may be used
  to create a merged clip.

  Director of Photography • Editor
  http://www.lightstreamassociates.com
• 

  Joe Shapiro

  February 22, 2016 at 12:38 am

  I’m still using FCP 7 as my main editing platform. I keep going back to Premiere to see if I can work comfortably in it and then run into these amazing roadblocks. This one is a prime example. I really do want to switch – but when I find things like this I just wonder – what the heck is going on inside Premiere that results in all these gotchas? (I was a software developer for 15 years so this isn’t a naive question)

  ——
  Joe Shapiro
  Director / Producer / Editor
  206-420-6411

  imdb.com/name/nm1497731/
  twitter.com/JoeSh

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