Why I love Muxing

W

wheatgrinder

To mux or not to mux .... no brainier for me now..

muxing is the step in your encoding process where you "join" the audio and video portions of your project into a "playable" file with both sound and picture.

Normally this just happens as part of your render, if you dig deep into some of the mpeg settings you might find some mention of muxing but mostly its inaccessible and not really useful from that pov.

Recently Iv been using a manual mux step in my workflow. I edit in PPro, do sound in cubase.

My old way would require me to render out of ppro each time I wanted to get a new Audio MIX into a playable file. What a pain.

Well, I know that pain no longer.

Now I use an external tool to bring my audio and video together without requiring rerending of video.

I have a muxer! The program I use is My MP4Box GUI 0.6.0.6, but there are many software options.

The mux operation only takes a few moments.

I can reuse the same video file over and over adding different audio mixes with only a few extra steps.

This tool also lets me do video in chunks.. for example, I didn't want to re-render my entire project just to add a credit sequence on the end. Rather I just rendered out the credit sequence, used the "join" function of that tool to cram the credits onto the end of the video.. Then I muxed in an updated audio mix to the now joined file

Now you know why I love to mux!

EDIT: FWIW I think you can do similar thing with QuickTime Pro, though its not called muxing.. you just replace the audio track.. never tried it.. but good choice for prores\mac users..
 
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That's good info to know, for more than the reasons you mentioned. My final render of Antihero was the worst experience ever! The full movie just proved, over and over, to be too much of a load for my humble little computer. I ended up breaking it up into smaller little chunks, and then re-rendering those as one. This software would've made the re-render unnecessary. I'm glad to have this for any future needs. :)
 
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Thanks again for this, wheaty. I just had to use it because stupid me didn't know what 'multiplexing' was and that I needed to change the default from 'none.' You just saved me from another 4 1/2 hour render! Thanks :)
 
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Glad it helped.. I have learned a few more things about this since the OP.

AC3 (surround sound encode) is NOT free with any of my Adobe Software. I found an AC3 encoder (free) that would let me encode multi-ch audio (multi ch wave or ever 6 separate wave files) into one AC3 file that I could then use in the same muxing process.
 
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tried mixing on a mac for the last 90 minutes. not going to buy quicktime pro and i've given up now on the whole process

everyone tried to tell me macs are better for video editing but this is not the first time i've had real problems with what is a simple task on pc
 
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