Help, Premiere is messing up my clip!

[Patrick Janka]

I'm working on lecture footage I shot today on a Sony NX5U. Everything was fine until the 2nd to last clip, where the first half is fine, but the second half the video plays as normal but the audio is flat lined and it just keeps looping the same second of audio til the end. When I play the original clip outside of Premiere it plays just fine. I tried deleting it and re-importing it, as well as restarting the program. What in the world is going on??

[Paul R Johnson]

The subject is pretty complex, and loads of people who have decent kit are really stuck in a typical small venue situation. Totally acoustic sets mean if it sounds good where you are standing, it will record ok. Add electric instruments and it goes pear shaped quickly, especially if the band are louder and uncontrolled. I'm actually in a touring band, and we usually play bigger events and take our own systems for best sound, but if we play smaller multi-band venues, or festivals, you have to use their systems, and it's always a compromise. Very often they get the drummer to play, or the ultra loud distorted guitar and then they build the missing sounds around them because you can't make these quieter. Adding extra everything is easy, but frequently turning the PA off still has the drums too loud! bet is that there is a glitch in the file, some playback software plays the files direct from the stream off disk, so when they find a dropped frame or two, they just freeze and then recover. As premiere creates working files as they import, you see this bottom right as a progress bar shows them coming in, the glitch may cause this. What you need to do is fiddly. Go into problem clip, and find the last frame that is good. Chop it there, and export that portion of the clip with a new name. Now comes the hit and miss part. Go forward on the problem area a few frames, and dump the section before it. Try to export this and then see if it imports? Hopefully you will end up with an idea where the damaged section is. You could even take the clip and and the point where it goes bad, just trim a couple of the first frame out and export what remains with a new name. It's not common, but usually fixable.