Why does rendering audio previews and peak files take sooo long?

[Jerry Wise]

I guess no one cares to respond.
Maybe no one knows the answer.

[Tod Hopkins]

I accept that it was a pretty vague and probably unanswerable question.

I believe it does not have a single answer, but rather a more general one: neglect of the audio components within Premiere. Just like exporting directly from Premiere isn’t as stable as transcoding in Encode, Premiere doesn’t handle audio as well as Audition. And audio has never been Adobe’s strength in any case.

In my specific case yesterday, the audio was not the root of the problem, just the obvious symptom. Eventually, I solved the problem by deleting all previews, both video and audio. Yes, everything worked fine once nothing was rendered, as one might expect. ????

You might think this would absolve the audio, but it doesn’t since it was obvious that it was audio playback that was choking. For instance, any time the sequence hit an MP3 original (always a struggle for Premiere) it choked. Two channels of audio or unrendered peak files also triggered choking. It was clearly changes in the audio load, not the video, that triggered failures. Once the basic resource was clear, the system could once again handle the audio load.

By the way, the video is multi-cam 4k. No apparent problems with video-only.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC