Rendering Milliseconds

[MillisecondHater]

Hello. Ran into a problem when tried to render a sound 09sec09millisec long.
After render, it becomes 09:0633 instead of needed 09:09. Tried multiple DAWs, every time the same issue.
After that i went completly insane and tried to render a sound through Premier Pro. When i render it as a MP4, it renders as 09:09. When i render it as a MP3/WAV - milliseconds are messed up again.
I am completely lost, please help.

[James Perrett]

If you are rendering to mp3 then you are possibly running into issues with the mp3 frame size.

[Martin Walker]

Hi MillisecondHater, and welcome to the SOS Forums!

No doubt someone will be along with more detailed explanation (especially if you tell us which DAWs you've tried.

However, an MP3 file is made up of a stream of MP3 'frames', so the rendered file length may indeed be slightly different (James typed faster than me )

Also, many DAWs provide the option to add a short amount of audio data to the end of a render, to make sure that reverb tails etc. are not truncated.

[Hugh Robjohns]

Does it sound truncated in any way? is anything obviously missing?

I think James is probably right, and that the apparent length discrepancy is just because the start/end silence has been stripped in the MP3 conversion and the remainder fitted into MP3 frames.

[merlyn]

After that i went completly insane and tried to render a sound through Premier Pro. When i render it as a MP4, it renders as 09:09.

If it renders correctly as video then it seems likely the :09 is not milliseconds -- it's video frames.

9 seconds 9 milliseconds is 9.009 seconds. I would expect a counter that ticks through milliseconds to have three digits. But let's say 9:0633 is 9 seconds 633 milliseconds. 633ms is 9 frames at 15 frames per second.

[MillisecondHater]

After that i went completly insane and tried to render a sound through Premier Pro. When i render it as a MP4, it renders as 09:09.

If it renders correctly as video then it seems likely the :09 is not milliseconds -- it's video frames.

9 seconds 9 milliseconds is 9.009 seconds. I would expect a counter that ticks through milliseconds to have three digits. But let's say 9:0633 is 9 seconds 633 milliseconds. 633ms is 9 frames at 15 frames per second.

Yep, that seems to be the case. Thanks a lot, you cured my insanity)

[sonics]

Why would a DAW output audio linked to frames? By default, they will output a file as second and milliseconds, surely? If the export section between markers is set to 9:09 I would expect that to give 9.09 as a WAV, or 9 seconds, 90 milliseconds. MP3 export will be slightly different as has been mentioned. Maybe the OP is seeing a different timebase?

[James Perrett]

Why would a DAW output audio linked to frames?

If you are working on a video project then you would normally tell your DAW to work in frames. The same goes for a CD mastering project. If you are composing music you may well tell your DAW to work in beats and bars.

The only time I work in seconds and milliseconds is when I'm mastering for vinyl.

[Folderol]

In a word - buffering.
In more words. Depending on the source, the hardware (and the price of buttons) there is nearly always some form of buffering along the way, and the size of the buffer gives the frame size.

Bah! Ninja'd

[MillisecondHater]

Why would a DAW output audio linked to frames?

Problem solved, its my bad. I used Premiere Pro to get the accurate time value of a mp4 video to do sound design on it and thought that the "09" after the seconds value were milliseconds, it turned out that that value was the amount of frames, so i got confused when my audio file (00:09:0900) didnt match the video.
Its all good now, got Adobe Audtion, thankfully it has the ability to give the accurate time value of a mp4 file in milliseconds

[sonics]

If you are working on a video project then you would normally tell your DAW to work in frames. The same goes for a CD mastering project. If you are composing music you may well tell your DAW to work in beats and bars.

The only time I work in seconds and milliseconds is when I'm mastering for vinyl.

Thanks James, I know all that! The OP said he'd used many DAWs. None default to frames IME. Bars and beats, maybe.

[sonics]

Its all good now, got Adobe Audtion, thankfully it has the ability to give the accurate time value of a mp4 file in milliseconds

Glad you worked it out.

May I take this opportunity to recommend MediaInfo. It's a cross-platform utility that will give you lots on information about media files without loading them into a program. I find I use it very often to see what clients have sent me. They often can't tell me when I ask them...

[merlyn]

Why would a DAW output audio linked to frames?

It's timecode. I use Ardour and the default clock is timecode. Reaper defaults to bars and beats, but also has minutes and seconds. What is exported will also depend on what the snap is set to, which could be different from the primary clock. The format usually tells us what the clock is.

timecode : hh:mm:ss:ff
minutes and seconds : hh:mm:ss.sss

So I don't know where 09:0633 came from or what it means exactly.