Rendering alters my sound...

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Rendering alters my sound...

Postby willows26 » Fri Apr 28, 2017 10:03 pm

I have just completed a fairly substantial project using many still slides with a huge number of keyframes. Within the project, which is an instructional video, I have interspersed 3 short videos. I have a music track running in the background throughout. There is voiceover in many instances, and on-screen text utilizing bullet points as the voice is heard. Whenever a voiceover starts, I decrease the volume of the music track so that the narration is clearly heard. All this works fine. Within the three interspersed videos there is a person in the videos describing what they are doing on screen, much like an exercise video. Their voice was recorded live with the video and is NOT a voiceover. For this, I manually reduce the music background, which is a separate track, so that the voice of the person in the video can be heard without problem. All this has worked extremely well and when I play the project on the computer, before rendering, it plays great. I use a very fast gaming computer to do all my video work and the project plays smoothly from beginning to end.

So after a lot of fine-tuning I was completely happy with the end result. But then came "rendering"! First try was an upload to Vimeo using the upload feature within Producer. It went off without a hitch. On playback of the Vimeo version though, I was surprised that in the short video sequences I interspersed within my project, the voice of the person speaking in the videos was greatly diminished and the background music sounded too loud. It was actually hard to make out what was being said! This, even though, the playing of the project file before the render, sounded perfectly mixed! So somewhere, from project to uploaded file, something negatively affected my sound.

I have since just made an mp4 computer file render of the project and it too, has this strange new sound mixture in it. And here I was all set to blame Vimeo's file processing! Instead, it would seem the problem lies somewhere with Producer's rendering process, or perhaps with my method of sound mixing.

Anyone have any suggestions for a fix for this? It is frustrating to have the sound files perfectly leveled in the project only to have them sound different in the finished render. Any help is always appreciated! Thanks! - Brad

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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby Marie78 » Sat Apr 29, 2017 3:37 am

Hi

I am not sure but I remember having something wrong with the sound of video I used but departing and/or ending in Proshow not at their real beginning or ending.

The solution I found was to cut the videos with an extra software and use the full cut parts in Proshow to get the sound to be perfect.

Hope that will heps
Chris Marie

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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby cherub » Sun Apr 30, 2017 12:19 pm

Hi Brad,

Without seeing your show, it's hard to know what's happening.

But, what you mean by "I manually reduced the music background" ?
Producer has a built in feature that automatically reduces the sound of the main track of the music whenever another sound is present in the slide.
Show > Soundtrack > Soundtrack during other sounds > Volume.
The default is 50%, but it can be changed to less, or more.

It also automatically functions on slides with video.

Is this feature not enough for your show?

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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby gpsmikey » Sun Apr 30, 2017 9:51 pm

The fact that it seems to sound the way you want in preview, but when rendered, it sounds different points to Producer as a problem here. I assume you are using the latest version of Producer? If so, I would try giving Photodex support a call - unlike most places these days, they actually have support people that answer the phone and know what they are doing.

mikey
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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby willows26 » Sun Apr 30, 2017 10:18 pm

Hi Marie and Mona....thank you both for your responses! Mona, when I say I "manually reduced" the background music, I mean that I canceled the automatic sound reduction, which I find lacking, by setting the defaults in the "Soundtrack During Other Sounds" box to '100' for volume and '0' for both of the fades; I then switched to "timeline" view and added audio points to the timeline and adjusted them to more appropriate locations and volume by dragging them with the cursor. It was my belief that the automatic settings could not be changed, thus my manual method.

I'm thinking now that the workaround here may be to separate the audio track from the video, using a video editing program, and then taking the audio by itself and importing it into an audio editing program where I can substantially increase the volume of the voices so that they can be heard over the music track, which by the way is now at 5% of it's original volume and can't be lowered any further and is still too loud. Once this is done I will re-insert the audio back into the video and render it as an mp4 for the Producer project. It's kind of hit and miss this way, but I don't see any other way of being sure that the voice in the inserted video will be heard over top of the music. I have to say I am disappointed that the Proshow Producer preview before rendering isn't more reflective of the final result. Doing it the way I just described is akin to working in the dark!

And as I mentioned earlier, when I previewed the project before I rendered it, all the various levels sounded perfect to me. After the render I was dumbfounded to find the background music had increased during the inserted videos and the video sound/voice had decreased. Other than that, the bulk of the project had rendered fine.

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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby willows26 » Sun Apr 30, 2017 10:25 pm

Oh hi Mikey, I see that you also replied while I was creating my last post. Thanks for that! Yes, I think that is good advice. After I try what I said I was going to do in my previous post, I will contact Photodex and see what they have to say about this. I am using PSP 8 and I have to say that I am 99% happy with all that it can do......it is an absolutely amazing program......and I wouldn't be surprised when all is said and done, I am probably the architect of this current problem I am having. Thanks guys for your help!

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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby gpsmikey » Mon May 01, 2017 7:12 am

Are you using the latest build (it has been around for a while though). When you have Producer running, select Help --> About - it should indicate what version and build. The current version/build is 8.0.3648 - I don't remember right off hand what "features" (aka bugs) were fixed from earlier ones, but it is always a good idea to make sure you have the current version.

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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby willows26 » Mon May 01, 2017 10:01 am

Yes Mikey....it's the latest build :)

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Solution!

Postby willows26 » Tue May 02, 2017 5:39 pm

Okay, I figured out the cause and the solution to this problem. What I did, when I first starting adding videos to my project was to take a video, select it and import it into my video editor first so that I could enhance the sound track, which had some background noise and low voice volume. I eliminated as much of the noise as I could and boosted the volume of the speaker's voice by about 200%. I then rendered the split files to an mp4 file which "reattached" the audio to the video. Once that was done I inserted it as a slide in my project. I fiddled a bit with the fade in/fade out of the main music track so that it didn't trample on any of the voice track attached to this video insert. That rendered perfectly. Unfortunately, the other two "insert videos" I put in the project didn't fare as well during the rendering process and this is why.

The second and third videos I followed the same process as above. Where I diverged from the process was at the stage where I rendered the split audio and video back together as a single mp4 file, ....in both cases. Instead I inserted each video, without their respective sound tracks into the project as video layers, and then I added as a "Slide Sound" their soundtracks to their respective slides. Doing it this way caused the rendering of the entire final project to yield an inaccurate replication of the project to that which I viewed in the preview stage before rendering. It would seem that splitting the audio from the video, for the purpose of doing some audio editing, and then not combining it back with the video after editing so that it becomes a single file, such as an mp4, created a problem for Producer. In Preview mode Producer represented the sound mixing inaccurately. In the final render, the main track background music no longer dropped off during the voice segments, the voice segments did not seem to be increased in volume, and, as a result, the slide didn't seem as professional as the rest of the project.

I have since redone the two bad video inserts, rendering them both to two single mp4 files. I deleted the old layers and slide sounds in the project and reinserted the new, improved video files in their place and tried a brand new render of the entire project. This time, everything is identical to what it was in the preview stage; when the videos play now, the sound drops as it should and the voices can be clearly heard.

So be forewarned, any sounds you introduce into your projects as "Slide Sounds" might not sound quite the same in the final render as they did in the preview. Or so it seems in this case anyway.

Thanks to all who gave advice....your kindness was appreciated! - Brad

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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby gpsmikey » Wed May 03, 2017 7:05 am

Ah, very interesting !! Thanks for the feedback. Once you split the audio from the video, as they said in Star Trek "all things are possible" - in your case, not all were wanted. I am still bothered by the fact the preview and rendered version were not the same. I have passed this along to Photodex so they are aware of it.

mikey
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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby willows26 » Sun May 07, 2017 1:04 pm

"Live long and perspire" Mikey! :mrgreen:

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Re: Rendering alters my sound...

Postby gpsmikey » Wed May 10, 2017 9:49 pm

That pretty well covers it :-)

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