This brief article addresses two issues for video editors. If you got here due to the key phrases: “Compressor horrible quality mp4” or “Media Encoder Losing Audio” or something similar, then hopefully this will solve your issues.
You may have noticed that FCP Compressor is awful for making MP4s. You may have tried to make that nice “internet quality” file using a .mov wrapper with h.264 codec and then change the extension from .mov to .mp4. Although that little trick will allow the file to play nicely in HTML5 browsers on desktops or laptops, they STILL WILL NOT PLAY in iOS devices – and Android depends on which version.
Unfortunately, there is no solution (as of this posting) for making a nice “internet quality” mp4 in Compressor. Use a different program. Case closed.
So, maybe you’ve tried to use Adobe Media Encoder, which makes really nice MP4 files using h.264 codec. But then… you may have run into the random problem of it stripping the audio from the final file. Well, good news here. I found out why! I posted this solution on an Adobe blog – was surprised that no one else had already addressed it. (So, hey, why not improve my own SEO with the solution?)
While we’re at it, I’ll use a couple of other keywords here that well help some other users fix a similar problem – “Youtube videos keep losing audio”
Like YouTube, Adobe Media Encoder is pretty sensitive to the number of audio channels. If you have a media file with more than two audio channels, YouTube AND Adobe Media Encoder may just throw out all the audio altogether. If you’re editing a video, simply combine all of your audio into two channels before you recompress in AME or upload to YouTube.
If this solved your problem, please forward this post on Facebook and/or comment it. Thanks!
