AAF generation from Premiere for ProTools

[Ray JB]

Hi All

Has anyone here got any pointers in relation to successful quick AAF exports with the current version of Premiere? The first two attempts from my editor on the film I'm working on were unsuccessful (heaps of media offline and what seemed like a corrupt AAF structure). I have all the files that the editor was referencing (and a number of these are m4a and mp3 temp ADR and music files in this pre-lockoff cut), and I was expecting that PT12.4 would not like the various sample rates and bit depths of these but do the usual conversion to the PT session bit depth and sample rate. But each time the session was opened up then PT would ask for the same media over again.

I then asked the Editor to export me an AAF with all media as whole files at 24bit 48kHz WAV files (non-embedded of course) but for this 97 minute cut, the generation of the 24 bit 48kHz sound-files took over 18 hours and then the AAF structure was being generated, which was aborted after another 6 hours of "progress bar" snail pace.

Is it usual for Premiere to be taking this long to export an AAF with whole files? The end result of all soundless in the premiere output folder was around 180 GB, I'm used to AVID MC taking an hour or two max! It seems absolutely painful to be taking over a day to output an AAF with Premiere, can't believe how bad this software is. Seems like AVID MC is a lot better in terms of handovers and quick outputs!

Has anyone had any luck in accelerating this process? Currently the film is in 1 large piece, not broken into reels as we are heading into a temp mix and reel breaks have not been sorted yet. Will premiere deal with things a bit faster if the timeline is busted into smaller chunks?

Any hints gratefully accepted.

Ray

[philper]

No specific advice except that in what I'm working on now the editor using non-48k compressed audio clips and having material spread over a lot of drives with a lot of duplicates and versions of the projects seems to hose up import into PT12. I'm finding these days that many editors have very chaotic work methods and don't really understand how to pass a project along in a way that makes it simple for the soundie to understand what they are doing.

[AndrewAction]

Originally Posted by philper

I'm finding these days that many editors have very chaotic work methods and don't really understand how to pass a project along in a way that makes it simple for the soundie to understand what they are doing.

Try making a screen shot of your PT's Edit page track layout (without the complication or your Aux tracks, sends etc) and track naming.

Adding a polite covering note explaining why this layout works for you may increase the chances of them being willing to give it a go.

Andrew

[Ray JB]

I think my Editor may have mostly resolved this long AAF generation problem, seems it was due to bad settings and also the rendering of effects on the audio taking ages.

Now I've just got to track down the missing bits that are present in the guide track but nowhere to be seen in the AAF.....

Arghh Premiere!