Premiere Pro is exporting audio at -3dB

[Asterra]

Shrug. I'm putting together a preliminary finalized video and I'm discovering that PPro is lowering the volume of my audio by 3 dB when it exports via Media Encoder. It's annoying. I have to convert the results to (or export as) 24-bit, fix the amplitude, and convert back to 16-bit. With eight separate channels to deal with, this is pointlessly time consuming.

How do I keep Premiere Pro from doing this? (And hopefully this won't be like asking how do I keep PPro from exhibiting a chroma bug with the ubiquitous AVCHD, or how do I unlink several clips at once, because the answers to those are the sort which inspire migration to Vegas.)

[Asterra]

Just reporting back. To my frank astonishment, I haven't been able to solve this one on my own (outside of simply correcting Premiere Pro's unwanted and destructive modification after the fact). I'm also unable to find references to this problem on Google. So there's little wonder that nobody's chimed in on this.

[budwzr]

I don't use PP, but you might check the master buss, or whatever PP calls it.

I guess PP doesn't want to scare their users with a lot of technical stuff, so it's probably buried somewhere in a dialog box.

Vegas does have a very sweet audio capability.

[Asterra]

I've just figured out why PPro is doing this. It is reducing the volume of each channel based on how many channels are in the project. Not completely unrealistic, but you have to imagine that any users who actually have multiple audio channels are probably doing a mix (!) of some kind, and likely know what they are getting themselves into, which eliminates any meaning behind this adjustment. Of particular note is the observation that Premiere Pro is ignoring when I have disabled all audio channels except for the one I mean to export; it is reducing the solitary channel's volume regardless.

So this means I need to know either 1) how I can tell it not to do this, or 2) how I can export a single audio channel in a fashion which tricks Premiere Pro into not destructively reducing its volume.

[poisondeathray]

I've just figured out why PPro is doing this. It is reducing the volume of each channel based on how many channels are in the project. Not completely unrealistic, but you have to imagine that any users who actually have multiple audio channels are probably doing a mix (!) of some kind, and likely know what they are getting themselves into, which eliminates any meaning behind this adjustment. Of particular note is the observation that Premiere Pro is ignoring when I have disabled all audio channels except for the one I mean to export; it is reducing the solitary channel's volume regardless.

So this means I need to know either 1) how I can tell it not to do this, or 2) how I can export a single audio channel in a fashion which tricks Premiere Pro into not destructively reducing its volume.

Are you sure about that? How do you have it set up ?

If you have 5.1 in and 5.1 out it should be the same volume unless you tell it not to

[Asterra]

Are you sure about that? How do you have it set up ?

If you have 5.1 in and 5.1 out it should be the same volume unless you tell it not to

I can only give you the data I have to work with. My project, at the time of my most recent export, had one 5.1 channel and 18 mono channels. The resulting exports had the following qualities:

5.1 channel exported by itself: Volume unaffected. Surround-left and surround-right missing thanks to a bug in Premiere Pro which I discovered about ten minutes ago (see relevant post if curious).

Mono channel exported by itself (x 8): Volume reduced by some 14.5 dB on each.

Now that I think about it, my conclusion about the formula dictating volume reduction must be incorrect. It must be reducing volume based on the total number of voices in the master track. An interesting discovery. It will reduce the time loss a bit. Although the time loss added upon discovery of the surround channel bug completely obliterates this gain. ;p

Feature request: Right-click change the nature of the master track.

[budwzr]

You probably have one or more audio tracks clipping.

OR

One or more of the audio tracks has way too low volume.

You might consider to set all your audio clips to the same levels BEFORE importing, and do the volume adjustments for your mix within PP.

The master buss has no brain, it's simply the "main valve". You need to adjust your sprinkler heads.