Issues with merged clips in CS 5.5

[Danny Nieder]

I just discovered this yesterday – unfortunately losing about 5 hours of work. I am working with wav files coming out of a Zoom recorder, and for some reason, I can’t modify those audio channels and make them into stereo. (option is greyed out) This is looking like a serious bug, and will post about it over on the Adobe Forums and submit a bug report.

[Vince Becquiot]

Danny,

You will only be able to modify the files that are not in the timeline or source window. Clear them all and you should be fine.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Danny Nieder]

Thanks Vince – I didn’t see the emphasized “Before” in a previous post. Does still seem like a bug, but glad there is a workaround.

[Vince Becquiot]

Danny,

Actually, it’s not a bug. When your footage is in a track (say stereo), you can imagine what changing the audio mapping to mono would do to your edit…

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Danny Nieder]

I just did a test and it worked for me. But, I guess I just am missing something – and maybe you can take a second to kindly explain. Here is the workflow that got me into trouble:
I set the Audio preferences in PPro to “Default Track Format: Mono.” That way, whenever I bring any footage or audio files into PPro, even if they are stereo files, it turns them into mono tracks. Coming from FCP, this makes my life easier and makes editing more comfortable with all mono tracks in the timeline.. (Maybe this is the part of the workflow that you will say – “don’t do that.”)
So, in the timeline, when I am merging a clip, I will have ch. 1 camera audio, ch. 2 camera audio, ch. 3 Lav (from the Zoom) and ch. 4 boom (also from Zoom) I sync the clips. I delete the 2 camera tracks and move the Zoom tracks into Ch.1 & ch. 2. Then, I merge the clips and get the new merged clip in my project panel. Finally, I drop that clip into my main sequence timeline (Also, all mono tracks) and edit away with perfect audio. When I quit and restart PPro, the ch.2 audio waveform (The boom audio from the Zoom) flashes, and then drops away to zero. It is gone – can’t recover it until I go through the whole process again.

So, can you please tell me why this is a feature and not a bug? If I am staying in a mono world from import all the way through, why does this need to happen? I appreciate any insight you can give, and I can also do a screencast of this if I wasn’t clear. Thanks for your help!

[Richard Lacey]

Is there any clear way to avoid this issue?
I’ve been dealing with it for weeks now and it’s brought my project completely to a halt.

The audio files and video files both have their audio tracks set to stereo in the project viewer.

[Tom Frisch]

This is most certainly a bug. If it wasn’t, then when you try to merge clips that have 2 mono tracks that weren’t properly separated from the source stereo file, it shouldn’t work- but it does until you quit.

Good thing I’ve only wasted 4 hours of my edit that I’ll have to re-do now.

Strange thing for me is that I’d been through several shutdown/startup cycles before the problem presented itself.

-Tom

[Cyrus Dowlatshahi]

Definitely a bug. I created a merged clip with a video track and four tracks of audio, all from different mics, and edited together a scene.

Now I have a sequence where you can’t hear one guy. How the hell do I save the hours I spent on this?

[Tom Frisch]

I ended up going back to the sequence where I synced all the audio (by hand, because I don’t have pluraleyes). Then I went through and used the clip start point from the incorrectly made mono files to align the correctly split out mono files. Then I cut the ends to match the video clip, and made a new merged clip.

Pain in the butt, but easier than resyncing everything.

Then I had to build my sequence up again, using the broken sequence as a reference for which clips I used, I replaced each clip by hand with the new correctly made merged clip.

Frustrating to say the least.

[Cyrus Dowlatshahi]

Damn.

I recreated my merged clips (in a “vol2” bin), and was manually laying in just the track of audio that went dead… when Premiere crashed.

Reopened my project and the vol2 merged clips now have a dead audio track in them!