Export to Media Encoder from Audition CC

While Adobe Audition and Premiere Pro are non-linear editing platforms, many organizations still follow a linear workflow. The video editor aligns the content on a timeline, then hands the project off to the color correction expert and the audio expert, who perform their respective tasks. Their final audio and video is merged, then exported to the final destination formats and sent to broadcast, the web, or wherever it's destined to end up. Right now, the task of merging the various elements often falls back upon the original video editor, who may already have moved onto the next project.  While this workflow made sense years ago, technologies like Adobe's Dynamic Link and Direct Link can offer significant improvements to make organizations far more efficient. The new functionality to export to Adobe Media Encoder directly from Audition helps you save time and money.

First, if you're not using Dynamic Link when sending your sequences from Premiere Pro to Audition for sound mixing, you're missing out!  This allows you to send a sequence to Audition without rendering a reference video. Premiere Pro effectively operates as a frame server, sending full resolution, full frame rate video to Audition, synchronized with the timeline and audio elements, and with full effects, titling, and more. Also, changes made to the picture in the Premiere project are immediately updated in Audition. This means that while the audio engineer is mixing and finalizing the sound mix for a project, the color correction expert can be creating and applying color looks to the original timeline in Premiere and the audio mixer sees them right away! No maintaining or synchronizing changed reference videos and no file transfers using thumb drives.

When the audio mix and color correction is done, typically the audio engineer would render an audio mixdown, consisting of one or more WAV files that must be sent back to Premiere Pro and imported into the timeline, mute the original audio channels, and generally introduce a lot of busy work before the sequence could be exported to AME.  Now, those changes stream through Audition via Dynamic Link directly into Adobe Media Encoder, resulting in perfect video, perfect sound, and perfect color!

Exporting to Media Encoder

From your Audition Multitrack timeline, choose File > Export > Export with Adobe Media Encoder.

AME opens in the background, and Audition offers all formats that AME supports. Select the Media Encoder Format to choose the destination format you would like, then choose from any format-specific preset based on your deliverable requirements, or leave the default Match Source to keep the same settings as your Premiere Pro sequence.

Many formats support Re-Wraps, which copy the video stream without any re-encoding, preserving the quality and fidelity of your original video. Audition also supports comprehensive channel assignment, especially for formats such as MXF, which can support dozens of embedded audio streams. The following image shows a sample track configuration in Audition.

In this case, you have your standard audio tracks, each of them routed through a separate Dialogue, Music, and FX bus. This not only allows you to toggle specific elements of your production on and off while working, but you can assign the output of each bus to various channels in the AME export. Why does this matter? Because many broadcast organizations use formats like MXF for more than just playing back videos. You may work with different language tracks, such as Spanish or French, in addition to the sound effects, music, and full English mixdown audio, and the playback systems know which channels to stream for which broadcast destination.

Audition makes it easy to create channel assignment presets and configurations so that projects can always conform to consistent assignments. In the following image, stereo output is assigned to channels 1 and 2, but broke out the dialog, music, and effects buses to separate stereo pairs in case you need to make changes later. For example, if you want to replace the music due to an expired license, you can just drop a new music bed into the video file and you don't have to render the entire project again.

Once everything is set up, click OK and the project is built and sent to AME. You can then continue working on a new assignment while AME renders quietly in the background.

How do I get started?

Download the latest version of Adobe Audition CC. Open a video file in Audition, or send a sequence from Premiere Pro.  Once your work has finished, choose File > Export > Export with Adobe Media Encoder to get started.