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Premiere Pro Issues When Working with Video from Mac
Hi there,
I have had an unusual amount of problems with Adobe Premiere Pro CC for over a year now. My Adobe Apps are fully updated, so that’s not the problem, but it seems that whenever I am working with video that has been exported from an Apple computer, the problems always occur. (I am using Premiere Pro CC 2015.4 on a 2 year-old PC.)
These issues do not occur when I bring raw footage into Premiere, only when I import .mp4 and .mov files that have been exported from Final Cut or iMovie.
Issue #1 — When I apply the Dynamics Limiter to the audio (set to -20dB), everything seems fine at first, but if I export the project or even play around on the timeline, the audio will often drop to below -40dB for no reason. Sometimes restarting the computer helps, sometimes I’ll get lucky with an export and it will work, but usually there will be large portions of the final exported video file that have really low audio levels. Much, much lower than the original audio in the clip. (I have to use the Limiter because the video is for television broadcast. There is no audio issue when the Limiter is turned off.)
Issue #2 — After exporting the final video, the timecode will be a few seconds longer than in the Premiere Pro timeline. Usually 5 to 10 seconds longer, depending on the length of the video file. The video clips and timeline are both 29.97, so not sure what would cause this unexplained fluctuation in video length.
Issue #3 — There are often video glitches in the final exports from Premiere. Small video “jumps” that are almost not noticeable. They occur randomly every few minutes. But now that I have typed this out, I’m thinking the video glitches may be what is causing the discrepancy in the timecode? (Issue #2)
I volunteer for a public access channel, and many of the programs we get have been exported from Mac computers. And it’s always these same issues. The source videos that I import into Premiere are 1920×1080, 29.97fps .H264 (.mp4) or ProRes422 (.mov) files, and I export to 720×480, 29.97fps, upper field order, MPEG2 (.mpg) files. The codec on the source files don’t seem to matter, just the fact that the programs were exported from a Mac rather than a PC. It’s this weird Mac-only issue that only happens when I deal with video files exported from Final Cut Pro or iMovie!
Has anyone else experienced this as much as I have? I have spent hours searching through forums but haven’t found a solution. Premiere Pro is the only editing software on the computers here, so I have to get these videos to export properly somehow with Premiere.
Any help would be very highly appreciated!
Thanks,
Jim -
2 Replies
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Have you tried opening the files in QuickTime and then exporting them as a new file? (on the Mac or the PC) Maybe this will strip out whatever is causing the problem. It’s a shot in the dark.
Joe
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Hi Joe! Thanks for the suggestion. I haven’t tried that yet. I don’t have Quicktime Pro but I’ll look into it.
I have found an awkward workaround that seems to be kind of working so far. First, I export the video file from Media Encoder as the exact same file type, just processed through Media Encoder. When I do that though, the audio is always exported as dead silence, so then I go back to Media Encoder or Premiere and export the audio as a .wav file. Once both the video and the audio have been exported, I marry them together in Premiere. This seems to get rid of the glitchy video blips that I was getting before.
Then, to get the audio limiter to work, I put edits into the timeline to turn the overall video into shorter segments on the timeline using the Razor tool. Then I apply the Dynamics Limiter to the clips on the timeline INDIVIDUALLY, not to the overall audio mix. This is the only way to keep the audio from fluctuating to those really low levels I was talking about in my original post.
So, between those techniques I’ve been able to export a video file that doesn’t contain any video glitches and also retains the -20dB audio limit through the whole video. I still haven’t figured out the unexplained extra time in the timecode, though. It still exports 5 to 10 seconds longer than the timeline timecode. I just told master control that the tv programs I’m submitting aren’t to time and have to be cut off at the end. I add extra channel ID filler at the end of the program to allow for it, but it’s still frustrating.
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