Adobe Desperately needs to enable reading of iXML in Audio Tracks in Premiere Pro

 

Adobe Premiere Pro desperately needs to add support for iXML audio date for secondary audio in Premiere Pro. Currently when you add your external audio in Premiere Pro you get zero of the Metadata that the Audio Recordist has added, you just get the audio.

This is the same Audio in DaVinci Resolve, in which the engineer has added Mix and TrkA and TrkB to the metadata! Why can’t we see this in Premiere?

Being able to see which track is what would make my whole life so much easier. Especially with lav and boom and mix. If the data is there, Premiere Pro should be able to read it for sure, and export it for the mixer to see as well.

Now this is in various places on Adobe Voice, but I have voted for them all but this hasn’t gotten enough votes for sure. 11 votes here. 5 Votes here. And 20 votes here.

Adobe please add ability to see both video and audio waveform in viewer window like DaVinci Resolve

 

Now as full fledged editor I still much prefer Adobe Premiere Pro over DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci Edit is functional, but just doesn’t feel as fully functional, and I like that I can setup the windows on Premiere Pro however the hell I want to, while I am much more forced into how they want me to do it on DaVinci, and that is my big complaint with Final Cut Pro X, engineers forcing you to do things there way. Also I am not a big fan of the new Cut Page. It feels very Final Cut Pro X to me. Yes I like how you can quickly scan through a folder as if it is a single sequence, but the actual editing is just not how I edit, and I would much rather have an edit control surface for the Edit page than for the Cut Page.

That being said there is certainly one feature in DaVinci’s Edit page that is far superior to Premiere Pro’s the Monitor window and the ability to overlay your Audio on the video either in zoomed in or the full audio. To activate this click on the 3 dots on the upper right of the viewer window and you can seelct either show zoomed Audio Waveform or Show Full Clip Audio Waveform. 

Premiere is either or, and you can do that in Resolve, but I just find this so much faster.

Either Video

Or audio in Premiere

But both together is such a time saver! Please Adobe I hope they adopt this soon.

There are over 500 votes for this at Adobe Voice, but if you agree please add your opinion. This is a timesaving feature that I really love and would love to see added to premiere.

OWC’s Rocket Yard on how to get 67% more performance on an external drive on an M1 Mac

OWC is reporting on what is obviously a bug with M1 Macs, because you shouldn’t have to connect a second display to get full speed write on the thunderbolt ports, but at least for now it seems you do.

Man Big Sur has been having some serious software issues when it comes to drives (losing support for SoftRaid for a full versions was huge!).

EDIT:

Since writing this OWC has figured out more ways to get the speed boost, check it out.

Amazing article at Frame.io on Batch Syncing Audio in Premiere Pro

 Sofi Marshall (who wrote the amazing article on setting up for remote editing with Premiere Pro) has another must read article on Batch Syncing Audio in Adobe Premiere Pro.

I too prefer Merge Clips to multi-cam clips if there is only one video track because it acts more like a clip, but the problems are very frustrating. Why there is no batch ability for Merge Clips is beyond me, and why not ability to flatten back to source as you can do with Multicam?

But the biggest gotchas are with Proxy and Audio.

If you are going to be doing Proxy always do it before you Merge Clips otherwise it doesn’t work.

The number one issue with Merge clips for me has been that it breaks AAF export and removes all the audio clip metadata. And her solution to export an FINAL CUT PRO XML and re-import and it will fix the audio tracks and return audio metadata is awesome (and if you get rid of the video you can just cut this audio in for your mix). Sure it is an extra step, but a quick one that will work easily, but remember to switch off linked selection before deleting video or you will have more problems with your sequence.

Now the thing that Sofi Marshall doesn’t mention that is a huge got you for Merge Clips, is that using Merge clips breaks Project Manager in Premiere. So if you need to use Project Manager, then Merge Clips is not your solution and maybe just stick with Multi-Cam clips.

And I have always done Merge Clips in a different way than she does. She uses Multi-Cam Batch to sync all of her clips, then goes into each Multi-Cam sequences and merges clips, using the multi-Cam batch to do the syncing.

Personally I just sort each folder by Media start and select the audio and video that corresponds (with similar start time code) and right click and merge clips.

And from the dialogue sync by audio and remove cameras audio.

My only complaint with this method is the weird sort issues of Premiere Pro’s bins, that even though I am sorting by start timecode, the new merge clips jumps to the top of the bin after it’s creation, and until I make a new clip won’t sort into timecode order. I never figured out if this is a feature or a bug, but to me it is a bug, if I am sorted in a certain order, I always want every clip to sort that way and anything else is just confusion.

Now there are literally a ton of threads on issues with Merge Clips at Adobe Voice, and I hope anyone who reads this will click on many of these to try and get Adobe to work on these issues.

HandbrakePM has been updated to 2.3 with M1 support, it is a batch version of the compression tool handbrake

 The open source video transcoder Handbrake has always been an awesome tool for compressing video, and should be in every video pros arsenal.

It’s lesser known sibling HandBrakePM, which is based on Handbrake (so uses the Handbrake CLI or command line interface) to do batch conversions. And it has been updated to include working on M1 processors. You should have Handbrake already installed for it to work.

You might not think you need this, but someday when you have a bunch of files to compress you will realize just how useful this is.

Adobe Speach To Text Early Access was not working yesterday, and I realized how quickly I have become addicted to it, it makes Testimonials so much easier!

 

#SpeachtoText @AdobeVideo  

This is what when I tried using the Transcribe sequence in Premiere Pro for a while yesterday. And I realized I don’t ever want to cut a testimonial without the transcription.

It is amazing I can start making selects on my first pass with the transcript. And my comprehension is better. Man this is a feature I can’t live without.

Unfortunately it looks like their 3rd party cloud infrastructure took a hit today.

I am pretty sure Adobe is going to have to expand their infrastructure because this is going to be a popular feature.

Arrow from Knights of the Editing Table copies a frame to your clipboard in Adobe Premiere Pro

 

The awesome Knights of the Editing Table has released a new plugin Arrow for Adobe Premiere Pro that will copy a frame to clipboard with a keyboard shortcut, and it is free, and you can save the image as well to a location that you chose.

And for users of their amazing keyboard launcher for Premiere Pro Excalibur, you don’t need this because it was added to the last update.

Adobe Speech To Text Early Access is absolutely amazing for editing testimonials

#SpeachtoText @AdobeVideo

So I applied to the Adobe Speech To Text Early Access program and was granted access, you can read about it and apply here.

I am editing testimonials and an assistant already cut down sequences so just the best bits are in a sequence.

All you have to do is go to the captions workspace and hit the Transcribe Sequence and it renders and uploads the audio track, and very quickly transcribes. I have had it take 3-7 minutes depending on length.

It then very quickly auto transcribes. And yes it has some errors, that are easily fixable. Basically I duplicate the sequence after transcription and make a cut version that I can cut out the pieces I want and cut them into another timeline. You can immediately jump around or search in the transcription, and just having the transcription follow along on the sequence helps my comprehension of what is being said.

This is truly life-changing! This is the most amazing new feature I have run across in an editing program.

And you can also export a txt file with the transcription though it doesn’t contain the timecode or the speakers, and I would love to see the ability to add in the timecode and to add the speakers for more than single speaker transcriptions. Currently the export txt is grayed out in Premiere Pro 2021, but works in the beta.

Transcriptions have always been helpful to find specific things in a long testimonial, but having them connected to the sequence where you can literally jump to an individual word is beyond amazing!

Adobe Updates Audition with M1 in version 14.2 Support and Premiere Pro with Text Gradients and Improved Captions in 15.2

 

Adobe updated Audition to version 14.2 with added M1 Support, the ability to Strip Silence and a new Loudness meter. 

Adobe also updated Premiere Pro to 15.2 with Text Gradients in Essential Graphics, Label Color for Captions and Improved Caption Trimming, the same new Loudness Meter as Audition, improved Canon XF HEVC performance improvements and Direct X12 Display support on Windows.

Blackmagic Design has reduced the price of ATEM Mini Pro and ATEM Pro ISO by $100 each

 

Now I think you only need the $295 ATEM mini if you attach it as a web camera to stream your edit live, but if you want your edit to be live on YouTube or to record it you could go for the mini pro.
Still the Web Presenter may in fact be a better solution for streaming for me. Since I have the $495 Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4k, I have spare SDI ports and that way I could stream a 4k sequence as the ATEM MINI only accepts up to a 1080 60p sequence while the Web Presenter accepts up UHD 60p sequences though streams out at only 1080 60p. Of course I lose the ability to see me in a picture and picture via a gopro.