AP can't handle AC3 properly anymore.

About 3 or 4 major revisions ago it had an internal encoder and decoder for AC3 built in. They worked out a license with Dolby that for every copy sold. Dolby would be paid a certain amount in royalties. When they switched to the 99% cloud, their accounting of what qualified as a copy sold got "creative". Dolby realized they were being cheated and came calling. Rather than pay any further future amounts they remove the encoder/decoder all together.

The reasoning was that Windows has an internal AC-3 encoder/decoder. So Adobe would just use that. Problem with that is that was only Windows 10. If you were on 7 at the time (like me) you were out of luck. Well turns out that the W10 AC-3 doesn't work well at all with AP. It can read AC-3 fine in AP and Audition but has a real problem generating accurate info for AC-3 files in export. Basically, the problems you described Croweyes. So if you are doing any audio work in AP you almost always have to use LPCM. I decode the 5.1 into 6 wavs, import that into AP, edit it and literally export each wav separately/individually and combine them back in another program.

A simpler way is not to use AP at all for editing. Take the AC-3 convert it into PCM 2.0 to act as a sync track, make your edits, export that and then do the real 5.1 changes in something like Audition, using that 2.0 as a guide.

(And as for Adobe, don't get me started on them removing MKV support)

(2020-02-28, 04:03 PM)PDB Wrote: AP can't handle AC3 properly anymore.

About 3 or 4 major revisions ago it had an internal encoder and decoder for AC3 built in. They worked out a license with Dolby that for every copy sold. Dolby would be paid a certain amount in royalties. When they switched to the 99% cloud, their accounting of what qualified as a copy sold got "creative". Dolby realized they were being cheated and came calling. Rather than pay any further future amounts they remove the encoder/decoder all together.

The reasoning was that Windows has an internal AC-3 encoder/decoder. So Adobe would just use that. Problem with that is that was only Windows 10. If you were on 7 at the time you were out of luck. Well turns out that the W10 AC-3 doesn't work well at all with AP. It can read AC-3 fine in AP and Audition but has a real problem generating accurate info for AC-3 files in export. Basically, the problems you described Croweyes. So if you are doing any audio work in AP you almost always have to use LPCM. I decode the 5.1 into 6 wavs, import that into AP, edit it and literally export each wav separately/individually and combine them back in another program.

A simpler way is not to use AP at all for editing. Take the AC-3 convert it into PCM 2.0 to act as a sync track, make your edits, export that and then do the real 5.1 changes in something like Audition, using that 2.0 as a guide.

(And as for Adobe, don't get me started on them removing MKV support)

Holy moly, I had no idea! I could swear that I did experiments with Adobe Audition and that one decoded AC-3 perfectly, so I was a bit confused that Premiere wouldn't, but this of course is a perfect explanation, it must have been an older version. Generally speaking newer Premiere/AE versions seem to be pretty broken in how they handle many formats, not sure why. You used to be able to cut something in Premiere, transfer the project to AE and get frame accuracy - no more! And vice versa as well. Open an old AE project in a newer AE version? Get ready for adjusting the position of every single clip frame by frame, and sometimes even that doesn't work! Many other things also went to sh**; AE's preview is basically useless in current versions, somehow they managed to remove the scroll arrows in AE/Premiere (forgot which one it was, maybe both), making navigating the timeline a nightmare at high zoom levels. But I'm going off on tangents...

I've always loathed Adobe's subscription model, it's honestly hilarious to see that this decision directly resulted in damage that goes beyond the ripping off of customers.

(2020-02-28, 04:17 PM)TomArrow Wrote: Holy moly, I had no idea! I could swear that I did experiments with Adobe Audition and that one decoded AC-3 perfectly,

Well here's the rub. Audition decodes and can edit AC-3 fine using the W10 internal decoder. Its just AP that can't do it when it once could using the Dolby decoder.

Strange stuff.

(2020-02-28, 04:23 PM)TomArrow Wrote: Strange stuff.

Adobe!

It's almost as if Adobe hates everyone that uses their products

(2020-02-28, 06:06 PM)zoidberg Wrote: It's almost as if Adobe hates everyone that uses their products

They have such a stranglehold on their market that they just don't care about their customers. They realized they can get away with virtually anything, so they lost all incentive to even hide their indifference or put any amount of effort into making a decent product. I've also personally experienced behavior by Adobe that is nothing short of exploitative and predatory - outside of the fact that it's all subscription-based now.

It's not actually surprising, you can see this very often when someone has a monopoly on something, specifically in the software world. No matter how bad and overpriced your product is, people will suck it up if you're the only one that provides at least kind of a solution. I've seen companies earn huge sums of money with terrible service contracts for a browser-based management software that doesn't look like it has received an overhaul in 30 years - frame-based layout, endless bugs, incompatibilities and on top of it all, they protected their code via encryption, so every time a bug was found, you would be dependent on them to fix it, no matter how small and easy to fix it was.

Really hoping for a serious competitor to challenge them one day and force them to reevaluate what they're doing.