[Dave Will]

Shane, unless I misunderstand you, that still doesn’t work. I would love to be wrong!

And how do you sync audio in Premiere so that the post house can go back to ALL the original audio after the edit is locked?

If you use multicam to sync audio, then you end up with those weird multicam files that are hard to work with. None of my editors like them (and neither do I). We spent an entire day trying to do multicam, and it’s just not practical for a feature. Too complicated and weird. It’s not how feature filmmakers work.

And if you “merge clips” to sync audio, then you lose the connection to the original audio. Do a search under merge clips and you’ll see the problems you’ll encounter down the road with conforming.

Not to mention the problem of syncing several thousand files in Premiere for a feature.

Resolve speeds up the transcode but you lose audio metadata, Premiere lets you sync audio (unsatisfactorily, but at least it works) but you have to do them one at a time. On a feature film that’s insane.

What is the solution besides having a team of a dozen people slogging through the process?

Low budget feature films have two choices:
1. Use Premiere and only have the timeline audio (with some handles) at turnover, thereby depriving sound editors of all the different audio track they may want to use — the lavs, the boom, etc. (Or use our workflow.)
2. Go back to using legacy ’90s editing software. Also known as Avid. Clunky and annoying, and you feel stuck in the past, but at least it works.

Currently, here is our workflow:
1. Export the edited project from Premiere 2018 to XML.
2. Import the XML into Premiere 2017.
3. Export the AAF from Premiere 2017, telling it to use all of the audio. (AFTER we go back and enable every single audio track, even unused ones.)
4. Give that AAF to the audio post house.
This means any audio we deleted in the timeline in the last three months will not be in this file. And the sound editor may need those. Oh well, too bad for us! That’s what we get for trying to use Premiere to make a feature.

Of course, you must use Premiere 2017 in this chain because Adobe introduced an AAF bug in 2018 and the file is corrupted upon export and completely unusable.

We’re doing another movie next year, and I have a year to figure out how to avoid this problem and still edit in Premiere. Or I have a year to learn Avid. (shudder)

[Dave Will]

Do NOT use Resolve for your dailies! We made this mistake on our feature film (rather, our idiot DITs made the mistake), and now we’re in post hell. Here’s why it’s a bad idea:

1. Resolve transcodes the video and audio together into files you can edit with.
2. You edit.
3. When you lock edit, the audio post house will want to match back to the original audio files.

SORRY! Resolve does NOT maintain audio metadata so you CANNOT match back to the original audio.

Lazy DITs (watch them on set — they are playing games on their phones 99% of the time) love Resolve because they just drag everything into the timeline and push a button.

It cost a time and money in post to fix the audio issues. DON’T USE RESOLVE because it THROWS AWAY AUDIO METADATA.