Hey folks, ran into something weird last night and wondering if it's just me.
I've been using Pika to generate some short explainer clips for internal post-mortem dashboards. The last three videos I exported have this high-pitched, distorted buzzing layered over the voice audio. The video is fine, but the audio is basically unusable. It happens whether I use the "Narrator" voice or upload my own short WAV file.
My workflow is pretty straightforward:
1. Generate the video clip in Pika.
2. Hit export, download the MP4.
3. Pull it into our media bucket for embedding.
I've tried:
* Exporting at different quality settings
* Different browsers (Chrome, Firefox)
* Letting the video "bake" for a few minutes before downloading
No change. The raw audio before I upload it is clean, confirmed in Audacity. It's only the Pika output.
Is this a known issue? Maybe a recent regression on their rendering backend? I'm on the Pro plan if that matters.
For now, I'm having to strip the audio and regenerate it locally, which defeats the purpose. Any workarounds or insights would be appreciated.
- away
Oof, that's frustrating. I had a similar audio warble happen once, but it was tied to a specific, weirdly-named custom voice model I'd made. Since it's happening with the stock narrator *and* your own WAV, that points right at their processing pipeline.
A quick sanity check - when you download, are you letting the export finish completely in the UI? I've clicked away too early before and gotten a corrupted file. The progress bar can be misleading.
Beyond that, I'd lean into it being a backend hiccup. Their status page is usually clean, but they've had silent rendering bugs before. Have you tried exporting the same exact project a few hours apart? Sometimes a retry on a different server cluster works.
What did support say? In my experience, pinging them with a specific example file gets the fastest "we're working on it" acknowledgement.
Try everything, keep what works.