Adobe Premiere Pro audio distortion

Question

Hi,
I have Adobe Premiere CS2 and some audio distortion problems. I captured a footage from my Sony DV Digital-8 camcorder. It's a standard DV footage with 16-bit PCM audio. When audio is nearly-peaking (not peaking), it gets distorted in Premiere, but doesn't in other applications (VirtualDub, Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, mplayer). I'm sure this is because an internal conversion (called conforming) from 16-bit PCM to 32-bit floating point PCM. Project Setting of the Audio Track is 48000Hz 32bit floating point - Stereo for a DV project, despites DV standard supports 16 or 12 bit Audio tracks. In user manual they write the following:
"For maximum editing performance and audio quality, Adobe Premiere Pro processes each audio channel, including audio channels in video clips, as 32-bit floating-point data at the project’s sample rate. To do this it must conform certain types of audio to match the 32-bit format and the project sample rate."
Well, if I'm a professional video editor, I can (and have the right to) decide whether which sample rate and bit-depth are the best for me, but they don't let me set audio other than the default, there is no option like bit-depth available not even when creating a NEW project. No problem if Adobe's genius developers thought 32-bit mixing provides much more quality, but if they forget to implement 16-bit to 32-bit internal conversion correctly, please let me decide to use at least a fallback method.
Thanks for your help
stringZ

Answer 1

Just looking at the waveform confirmed my initial reaction: Way, way
oversteered. Everything is clipped and your best approach is to
reshoot. That some players can handle this seriously mistreated audio
may be caused by audio limiters. They should, otherwise you would blow
up your speakers.
Well, you can say that and if this sample was a music maximized with compressors, it would distort too. Sony Digital-8 camcorder has an internal limiter, so only soft-peaking can occur, but no serious distortion. Media Players (eg. mplayer) don't have limiters unless you specify an external limiter filter. I've already told this isn't the clip you want me to re-shoot. This is a sample I created to show you the problem. I sent this to one of my friends who has Ulead MediaStudio Pro 7.0. It doesn't distort there either. Have you tried loading it to an audio editor like Audacity or Adobe Audition? You can see no hard-peaking or distortion if you zoom in the waveform.
Waveform at 00:00:00:21. No distortion, only high levels can be seen on this waveform.
Waveform after 00:00:00:21. Soft peaking in right (bottom) channel.
I'd appreciate if someone took this seriously instead of repeating "reshoot it" and "high levels".