Bizarre Premiere Pro bug that I can't find a workaround for

[Asterra]

Here's my deal. I'm putting together a 7.1 channel Premiere Pro project. Since PPro (CS4) doesn't support 7.1, I'm doing all the editing as 8 mono channels. This unavoidably involves some extra work but I'm willing to deal with that.

Here is my workflow: In order to create six channels from an existing 5.1 channel track in PPro, I am choosing "Edit in Adobe Soundbooth -> Render and Replace". This opens the 5.1 clip in Soundbooth, but it also renders the clip as a 5.1 channel .wav in one of the auto-save folders. So I take this .wav, load it up in Adobe Audition, and save each of the six voices as individual files. (Incidentally, I also have to manually insert 1 sample of silence at the end of each individual clip or else PPro will completely truncate the entire final frame's worth of audio. Lovely.)

This process results in six files which have automatically been given convenient names. For example:

clip.new Audio Extracted [Front Left].wav
clip.new Audio Extracted [Front Right].wav
clip.new Audio Extracted [Center].wav
clip.new Audio Extracted [LFE].wav
clip.new Audio Extracted [Left surround].wav
clip.new Audio Extracted [Right surround].wav

So far so good. Here is where Premiere Pro has a bizarre bug. When I import these six files, Premiere Pro (almost invariably) somehow sees all six files as the same exact .wav (and this seems to be Front Left). This is despite the fact that the six .wavs are manifestly discreet, as can be easily verified in Adobe Audition. I've tried eliminating Audition's .pk files. I've tried copying the .wavs as completely new files with different names, in an attempt to "trick" PPro. But no. Somehow PPro is getting faulty cached information about what the .wav data actually is, despite my best efforts to locate and eliminate this data. (And yes, playing the audio from within PPro does reveal that it really is somehow conjuring inaccurate audio data from somewhere.)

I literally cannot proceed with my project until this one is solved. Please help. ;p

[poisondeathray]

Is this for 8 channel (7.1) or 5.1 channel ? I'm missing something here that's not explained in your post

[aedipuss]

nice bug! maybe cs4 is getting fooled by the names and trying to append them? i'd rename them fl.wav, fr.wav, etc or something like that to test.

[Asterra]

Is this for 8 channel (7.1) or 5.1 channel ? I'm missing something here that's not explained in your post

Perhaps I should have left the 8 channel aspect out of my post. It's actually not relevant to the bug. I only mentioned it because otherwise somebody would be likely to wonder why I'm taking the trouble to separate 5.1 channel audio into its six components.

[Asterra]

nice bug! maybe cs4 is getting fooled by the names and trying to append them? i'd rename them fl.wav, fr.wav, etc or something like that to test.

I did try that (mentioned in the first post). PPro is still getting data from somewhere else. It's either referencing some flag inside the .wav files, or simply assuming that any .wav file that is exactly 88246 bytes large has to be the one it's tucked away in its cache. Either way, it's a bug and I am stuck.

[poisondeathray]

did you try clearing the media cache ? That's the first thing folks at the Adobe forum suggest for any problem

I did a quick test with eac3to, and PP imports mono wavs , as mono wavs generated from eac3to, each with different waveforms . But... the ends are truncated too, but only when put in the timeline. Weird.

[Asterra]

A temp fix I've discovered is to redo all of my saves in Audition with "Save extra non-audio information" unchecked. The result of this is that PPro will play the audio correctly but will fail to display the waveform either in the timeline or the source monitor. Why it would fail to do this, I wouldn't know. Far be it for me to label PPro as buggy.

[poisondeathray]

Hmm...Everything works ok here now, after cleaning the cache .

Do you have show waveform enabled ?

[Asterra]

Hmm...Everything works ok here now, after cleaning the cache .

I just cleared my cache (and now get to wait an age for a terabyte of video data to be re-indexed ;p ) and the audio issue persists. I will have to grit my teeth and re-save each file without "extra audio information".

Show waveform is enabled. It seems PPro cannot show a waveform without that extra audio information.