MXF & Premiere Pro are battling for the soul of my computer

[Tero Ahlfors]

Try turning off hardware accelerated encoding in Preferences – Media.

Or render the whole sequence in a high quality format and use the preview files when exporting.

[Claire Presnall]

Cool. I’ll look into that just as soon as my next video that is ALSO doing this super fun thing that I am definitely enjoying finishes outputting from AE. That little box is definitely checked. I mean, it should also be checked in the first one which worked, but if memory serves that one didn’t have any multicams. Hmmm… The plot thickens (or perhaps thins).

I’ll let you know if that fixes it.

[Claire Presnall]

So far, we’re still hanging up right at that 41 second mark. I don’t have time to sit and wait and see if we ever make it past that right now. But I’ll give it another go tomorrow and report back.

I’m suspecting it has something to do with the multicams. I was having some issues with the audio on those getting blown out that required a bit of a brute force workaround.

[Rob Mcgreevy]

We’ve had weird problems on our Mac setup and MXF’s in the past as well. Source clips would cut off early and not display completely in PP. So a 10 min. clip would only show the first 2 minutes in PP. You’d check it in Finder and it was all there. We’d load it in our PC based edit suite and it would work fine. Maddening! The thing that seemed to cure it for us was to convert the source MXF’s to ProRes before editing and that cleared it up.

[Claire Presnall]

Ya know, I thought about doing that, but each video is hours of interview footage at 4k, and my fancy new baby has just been plugging away doing her thing, so I got cocky. And now I’m paying for it.

Also, the lav audio is baked into the cam 1 footage, and when I transcoded it straight from the Finder through ME, it blew out the audio (like the multicam issue I describe in the next paragraph), which was part of my hesitation as well. No matter what settings I chose, it was like “let’s turn this baby up to 15. Fuzz is where it’s at!”

But back to this issue. It’s definitely something to do with the multicams (which is funny that those aren’t the clips the error messages are fussing about). The 2 videos with 1 camera set ups exported just fine. Before sending to AE, I flattened the multicams since AE doesn’t seem to know what to do with them, and AE exported without issue. And when I was building the multicams, it was blowing out the main audio. I would have to move my audio then delete the top audio tracks because it was something baked into those tracks themselves.

I think the moral of the story is MXFs are the devils codec.

[Tero Ahlfors]

MXF is not a codec, but a container. It can have all kinds of stuff in it.

[Cathy Jackman]

Actually, my experience is that Multicam in Premiere Pro is the devilish problem.

Coming to the end of a sizeable multicam project, Premiere began unable to handle my project. I tried everything that you did – this was on PC, and I even moved it to my Mac. In the end, I couldn’t afford any more downtime. I moved the project to Avid.

I never found what exactly was causing the problem – was it audio, video? Adobe was not able to help. I hope you are able to figure it out – but I don”t think MXF files are the problem.

Good luck

[Rowdy Wiegmans]

A workaround might be to change container, clip by clip to pro res or dnh (or create a proxy batch) to see if it’s a single clip that gives you the problem.

If not; explode from multicam to multitrack

Still?; remove effects

Then; export xml to see if davinci will do it

Work your way backwards would be my advice.

Good luck! 🙏

[Claire Presnall]

Based on all my workaround attempts, I think you’re right that it’s the multicams vs the MXFs. The multicams were janking my audio levels too, and just being all around not friendly, but they seemed less irritated by the .movs and .mp4s. The multicam video was disabled at the sticking point, and we were seeing straight MXF b-roll (hearing multicam audio), so I was thrown off the scent. My error reports kept listing specific files and timecodes, making it :40ish seconds into a 3 minute edit, and I foolishly believed them, wasting 2 hours removing and replacing clips, trying to find the secret formula before flattening the multicams and sending everything through AE. The flattening was probably the fix, and the AE was probably unnecessary.

[Claire Presnall]

But actually, I spit it out of AE, brought the mov of the edit into PP, dropped it on top of the disabled video and used the multicam audio (because when I flattened it, it chose whatever audio was attached to the visible clip rather than the good audio on the main camera), and voila, everything exported beautifully. So the multicam audio wasn’t an issue there.