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1. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Mark Mapes Jul 18, 2013 12:27 PM (in response to Stefan497)Could you be more specific about the steps entailed in "subclipped the vision and audio by selecting both, grouping them and then dragging them into a bin in the project window."
Here's my workflow for creating subclips in this scenario
- Assemble the assets on a timeline
- In the Timeline, select the track items that I want to include in a subclip.
- right-click one of the selected track items and select "Merge Clips..." -- I'm curious whether the resulting file is what you'd consider a "subclip." In my mind it's a merged clip.
- Select the appropriate option in the Merge Clips dialog and click OK.
- In the Project panel, double-click the resulting merged clip to load it in the Source Monitor.
- In Source Mon, set in & out points.
- Make Subclip (via Clip menu, Source Mon's context menu, or keyboard shortcut)
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2. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Stefan497 Jul 18, 2013 8:34 PM (in response to Mark Mapes)Hi Mark,
Apologies about the terminology used. Forget the subclip, all I actually need to do is merge the items. The process I go through is the same as you have detailed above. It's in the merging of the items where the issue takes place. Here's what happens in a little more detail:
1. Assemble assets on timeline.
2. Select desired tracks, right-click on selected items (in this case 1 video and 3 audio items) and select "Merge Clips"
3. Generally I leave the Merge Clip settings as is (nothing selected or ticked) as they are irrelevant. (I have played around with different settings to see if they change the outcome but it doesn't) I then click "Ok"
4. The new merged clip then appears in my project window. I either drag it into the desired timeline, or send it to the source monitor to change in/out points (same result either way), and then this happens...
As you can see in the following image, all the original audio is there (A1, A5, A9) but separated by a bunch of dead audio trakcs (A2-4, A6-8)...
I tried it with a clip that had 4 audio tracks and the resulting merged clip had a total of 16 audio tracks. This same mysterious audio track generation is also carried forward to ProTools - the 16 tracks in Pr CC suddenly become 64 tracks in ProTools (have tried encapsulated and separated audio settings, entire audio files and trimmed audio file settings... always the same).
On a side note, I have just tried sending the timeline to Adobe Audition CC and the track numbers don't increase which is interesting. Still doesn't solve my issue but at least I have a temporary workaround (still a bit of a headache but at least I'll meet my deadline).
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3. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Mark Mapes Jul 19, 2013 12:40 AM (in response to Stefan497)Glad we cleared up the terminology. I wasn't being pedantic. Just wanted to make sure we're on the same page.
Now, the good news is I've gotten similar results. What appears to be happening in my case is that merging clips converts my stereo tracks into separate mono tracks. So I go from an A/V clip and three stereo tracks to an a merged clip with 1 video track and eight mono tracks. None of them are "dead," but then all the stereo channels had audio.
So what I suspect could be happening in your case is that your WAV files are 4-channel, but they have audio on only one channel, with the other three flat. If that's the case, then when the multichannel track gets converted into 4 mono tracks, 3 of them will be empty.
What I don't know is whether converting the audio to mono channels for merged clips is by design. I'll ask an authority tomorrow.
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4. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Stefan497 Jul 19, 2013 3:35 AM (in response to Mark Mapes)Thanks mate, that might help point me in the right direction. Although the four audio channels I have in the original timeline (before I merge the items) consist of 2x lapel mics (both mono) and a stereo boom setup (so 2 more channels of audio).
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5. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Mark Mapes Jul 19, 2013 10:21 AM (in response to Stefan497)The experts in this area confirmed that the results I got are as designed: merged clips break stereo and multichannel audio out into separate mono channels. We realize there's room for improvement in the design, but for now my results are to be expected.
If the source is multichannel but some of those channels are empty (or you simply want to exclude them), then their recommendation to avoid the unwanted channels is to disable those channels in the source assets prior to merging, which is accomplished via Modify Clip>Audio Channels.
That said, I gather that none of this explains your results with two mono sources and one stereo. If you provide a simple project complete with short sample clips, I'll see where the empty audio channels are coming from.
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6. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Tenkisoukan Jul 29, 2013 4:08 PM (in response to Mark Mapes)There might be some flaws in the design. That is when you merge a clip in from a sequence where the audio is already mapped to 2 mono from stereo, the merged clip still splits the mono tracks into two tracks. Resulting an always empty track next to the track with audio. For example, I have a sequence that has 4 tracks on mono, which was mapped from 2 stereo tracks, when I merge these tracks, it becomes a 8 track mono in the merged clips, with track 1,3,5,7 has audio and track 2,4,6,8 empty.
This is very annoying, since when you editing dual dialogues it will make your time line's audio track expand to like 12 tracks or something. Is there a fix to it?
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7. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Faintscrawl Aug 22, 2013 5:46 AM (in response to Stefan497)I have the same problem.
Using Pluraleyes I synced up ProRes files converted from an FS100 with audio from a Sound Devices recorder that had four channels. At that point I had 5 channels. I "merged" the clips and pulled them into a bin. Suddenly they have 20 channels of audio! This is a pretty big project; it's unwieldly to be dealing with all the empty tracks of audio. Is there a way to avoid this, hopefully without having to resync in Pluraleyes (because that was a painful process in itself).
I had a very similar project a few months ago, which I edited on PP 6 (Now I'm on CC) and I didn't have this issue.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Tom
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8. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Faintscrawl Aug 22, 2013 7:36 AM (in response to Faintscrawl)Just wanted to say that I tested this on PP 6 and it worked properly. When I merged clips I got a new clip with only 6 tracks. Yay!
I think I'll edit this project on PP6.
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9. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
moviedude42 Nov 12, 2013 6:27 PM (in response to Mark Mapes)I having the same problem stated in this disscussion. I tried the fix using the Modify Clip>Audio Channels but that didn't do anything. I'm now dealing with a project that has one track of mono audio. I'm then bringing it into Pluraleyes3 to sync it, when it comes back into Premeire it is dual mono. Then I drag the clip into the bin and tell it to merge then I bring it back into a sequence it has 4 audio tracks. I tried to contact Adobe technical support and they were no help and basically said there was nothing that I could do until there is an update that fixes it. I really need this fixed as soon as possible I'm working on 2 projects right now that I was really counting on this workflow for and with this problem I can't use. Please any help to fix this would be amazing! Thank you!!
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10. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
moviedude42 Dec 10, 2013 9:04 AM (in response to Mark Mapes)Hey Any help on this would be great I'be been having this problem and I've been trying to find something to fix it for months and so far nothing. As I said I called adobe and they just said that I just have to deal with it until it's fixed but seeing as I have no idea when that will be that is not ideal. Along with that I've been also having a problem where when I sync the audio up not in this way and I close out and come back into the project later the audio disappears on the merged clips. if you would like me to expand on that I can.
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11. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
E_Todorov Mar 14, 2014 8:59 AM (in response to Mark Mapes)Hello.
In my case when I merge an audio file with 3 mono tracks i get 9 (6 empty ones) tracks once it is dragged back to the timeline. if the tracks are 4, I get 16 etc (basically its x² tracks). Is there a workaround, so I don't have to flood my timeline with dead tracks yet?
Thank you in advance!
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12. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Sian Fever May 1, 2014 8:10 AM (in response to Mark Mapes)Just posted this in another, similar thread, so cross-posting here:
1. Merge clips, which results in the dead tracks.
2. Right-click on merged clip in project panel > Modify > Audio Channels... then specify the number of audio tracks, and patch the correct tracks with the drop-downs below.
You can set up presets, so if like me you're doing this for a gigantic project, you can speed up the process.
Hope that helps!"
[Text formatting corrected.]
Message was edited by: Jim Simon
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13. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
ReisomNomad May 6, 2014 12:58 AM (in response to Stefan497)This exact same thing is happening to me. This "feature" is exponentially duplicating empty tracks. Clearly this is a bug in the code designed to break merged stereo tracks out into individual mono tracks. These are not empty stereo tracks. They are recorded as mono tracks with audio in them but being "split" into multiple tracks, one with audio and the rest are blank. The problem is that Premiere is treating ALL tracks as stereo and creating a number of new, empty tracks for EACH track equal to the total number of tracks when you use the Merge Clip feature.
i.e. If I have 3 tracks of audio that I merge into a clip, it creates 3 tracks for each of those three tracks, resulting in 9 total tracks (3 with audio and 6 empty ones). 4 tracks in a merged clip creates 16 tracks, 5 tracks creates 25, etc.
I have tested this with stereo and mono tracks in a merged clip and the results are the same. I got interesting results when I merged stereo and mono tracks into the same clip. I had a single stereo track and 5 mono tracks. "Merge clip" turned this into 27 tracks. 5x5 mono tracks plus the original stereo track that was split into 2 mono tracks, making 27.
HOWEVER
This phenomenon has not occurred on every single clip in the film I am currently working on; rather, it has only occurred on most of them.
Specifically, this only seems to be occurring when merging clips including multi-track .wav files. There were a few scenes where the sound guy only recorded the two actors with lavs onto a single stereo track, with the actors split between the L and R channel. When the stereo track is merged it correctly makes two mono tracks out of the L and R channels. But every single clip I have come across since then where he also added the boom mike or a channel for a third actor, I get exponential track city.
The conclusion I have come to is that Premiere is recognizing these multi-track .wav files as separate mono tracks when you drop them on the timeline, but the "Merge Clip" feature is mistakenly reading each track in a multi-track .wav files as a "single multi-channel track" that needs to be broken up. I say "single multi-channel-track" because there isn't a word for it that I am aware of. A single track with two channels is called "stereo" but it is like Premiere is reading the four mono tracks as a single track with four channels, but then making it worse by thinking EACH track has a number of channels equal to the number of "channels" it thinks are in the track.
So again, it reads each track in a four track clip as a single track with four channels, then breaks each "channel" into four separate tracks, thus creating the exponential increase in the number of empty tracks. (3 tracks become 9, 4 becomes 16, 5 becomes 25, etc).
Going into "Modify -> Audio Channels" is a lame workaround because I shouldn't have to painstakingly go through every clip in a movie just to manually turn off tracks that shouldn't exist. Presets, as suggested, are only somewhat useful because the positions of the real audio isn't always placed on the same tracks. Their location is also dependent on the number of tracks being created. When four tracks are merged, the audio is located on tracks 1,6,11, 16 while the audio for 5 merged tracks is on 1, 7, 13, 19, & 25, with 6 tracks it is placed on 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, & 36. So the only way for me to know which tracks to suppress on any given clip is for me to open up the clip and visually determine how many actual tracks there are and which ones to delete. This is crazy. To go back and fix this after I've synced everything will probably take me days of work. If I had known about this before I synced everything it wouldn't have been as hard to determine how many tracks each clip had as I synced it. But I shouldn't have had to in the first place. This shouldn't be happening.
This is not a feature, it is a bug. Period.
Clearly, this could not have been intentionally designed, but it is a serious and crippling error in the way the program is interpreting the tracks with the code that was intended to just break out stereo channels into mono. Perhaps it is a miscue between the way the recording device encodes the multi-track .wav file and the way Premiere reads it. I don't know. I do know that the audio I am working with was recorded on two separate professional recording devices by two different pro sound guys in Hollywood so this isn't some amateur mistake. It is easily doubling the amount of work I have to do with my footage/audio before I can start to work with it.
Somebody needs to take another look at that code and fix this as soon as possible.
(Does this make any sense or do I need to clean this up for clarification?)
Damon Mosier
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14. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
ReisomNomad May 6, 2014 1:11 AM (in response to ReisomNomad)Here is a screenshot. Here are three different merged clips brought back onto the timeline, immediately followed by the original multi-track .wav file that it was merged from. As you can see, 4 tracks become 16, 5 become 25, and 6 become 36. These were all recorded as mono tracks; there were never any stereo tracks with these clips.
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15. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Mark Mapes Jun 18, 2014 2:15 PM (in response to ReisomNomad)In the new release, CC 2014.0, changes were made in the way audio is handled with merged clips so that dead audio tracks are no longer created. Note that this change affects only clips merged in CC 2014; those merged in CC7.x will continue to have blank audio tracks.
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16. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Sian Fever Jun 19, 2014 2:14 AM (in response to Mark Mapes)*high fives everyone at Adobe* THANK YOU.
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17. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
Michal_PS Jun 19, 2014 8:26 AM (in response to Mark Mapes)this was actually the first thing I checked after upgrade to CC 2014 and I was really very happy it was finally fixed!
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18. Re: Dead audio tracks generated after subclip created
EmilyRobb Aug 29, 2014 5:33 PM (in response to Mark Mapes)Hello, I have been having the same issue. I Just installed CC 2014 but it hasn't fixed the problem.
I re merged some clips then added them to my timeline and i I still have dead audio tracks...







