… for Adobe Premiere Pro CC

Tip #1035: Bugs in Automatic Scene Detection

Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com

Scene Detection works reliably provided you don’t unlink audio from video.

There are two significant bugs in the new automatic scene detection feature in the 14.4 update to Adobe Premiere Pro.

Scene detection reviews a clip, then adds cuts where the scene changes. This is a big help when you need to deconstruct an already-edited piece, or need to chop up DV or HDV footage where multiple takes are contained in a single clip.

NOTE: Scene detection can also create subclips or add clip markers, if that is your preference.

However, in preparing my recent webinar on the “New Features in Adobe Premiere Pro” I discovered two significant bugs in this process.

First, if you unlink audio from video for the clip you want to process, scene detection will fail more than 90% of the time. (If the clip is not unlinked, scene detection works reliably.)

Second, if you don’t want the audio cut, Adobe says you can merge the audio back into a single clip after scene detection cuts a clip. However, when the audio segments are selected in the timeline, the Merge option is disabled.

EXTRA CREDIT

The best option, if you want to cut video and not audio, is to leave the audio and video clips linked, use scene detection to cut the clip, then, delete all the audio segment except the first one, then roll trim the first clip back to its original length.