How can I merge a large collection of video-audio pair of clips without having to repeat the work for each individual pair in Premiere Pro?

Question

I have a large collection of video clips, each with its corresponding audio clip that I want to merge. I need to automate the process by having each video clip merge with its respective audio clip, then have all the merged clips exported as mp4 file. How do I do this in Adobe Premiere Pro 2020?

Answer 1

What format are the seperate audio/video files? Are the audio files currently in sync with the video?

I did this recently with some old source files that had originally been authored for DVD, the source files were .m2v / .wav pairs of files. I used TMPEGEnc Smart Renderer to merge all the source files into one big .mpg file (no re-encoding in this step with that tool, so no quality change), and then fed the resulting file into Handbrake to get an MP4 file. For a one-off, you can likely just use the trial version of Smart Renderer.

For Premiere it would basically be the same, import all the source files, create a sequence, and then drag the video & audio files onto the sequence as appropriate, and export to H.264 Format. Smart Renderer worked easier for me, as the files were mostly prefixed with number order, and the video/audio files had matching names, so I could literally just import a folder at a time into the project, and not have to rearrange anything to get the correct pairing and sequencing - a bunch of the manual sequencing work got done for free by doing it this way. Premiere just would have taken longer to do the same job, plus not trusting myself not to make a mistake somewhere manually building the sequences.