AAF with regions jumbled?

[Brandonx1]

Anyone ever seen an AAF where the clips are either miss linking or not correct in the timeline. On the Avid side, the aafs import fine, on the PT side, skipping or repeating lines ect. I think the music is ok but the production audio is hosed. Any ideas?

[Leverson]

I don't know if this is related or will help you at all, but just a couple weeks ago I got a music session that had something similar, the clips were all in the right places but linking to the wrong cues, with no discernible rhyme or reason I could tell (so track 67 was playing at the exact same clip start that track 01 was supposed to be, and all the cue order that followed made no logical sense at all, all jumbled around).

Turns out the music editors session was starting at 00:00:00:00 while my mix session was starting at 00:55:00:00, and even though I had changed the AAF start time on my Import Session window box, it still came in all jumbled. When he changed the start time of his session to 00:55:00:00 to match mine and re-sent, everything imported correctly on my end.

No idea if that is related to your issue at all, we didn't dig any deeper than that once we got it working. It was also the first time I had seen anything like that happening.

[Leverson]

Also I have seen this happen on documentaries edited in FCP where some clips or news videos had been pulled from the internet or captured from YouTube with really funky non-standard frame and sample rates. When importing the OMF the clips would play the wrong section of audio from within those files.

Checking source audio sample rate would be something to look at. It could be that the Avid is set up to import mixed and matched sample rates while Pro Tools is trying to convert them to the session format and doing a bad job and slipping and sliding the region content around.

Just a guess.

[Brandonx1]

Thanks for the help. It's coming from a media composer. I think it's a frame rate issue on their end. Seems like the audio might be at a different frame rate than the sequence. Totally hosed at this point. Anyone else have an idea what's going on or how to fix it?

[alexeymohr]

You're describing the misery of Avid Media Composer's "mixed format timeline." Ah, the joys of post production :roll eyes:

Here's the deal: the AAF or OMF you're importing from probably has audio files that are stamped with various different frame rates, such as 23.98fps and 29.97 DFTC. Avid now lets you do this, even though it's a terrible idea.

On our end, Pro Tools decides that it only wants to properly import the audio that is stamped with the same timecode rate as the session you're creating/importing into. So some audio probably isn't even importing at all for you.

To make matters worse, if they are primarily working in 23.98FPS and have a few files at 29.97, so you decide to just make a separate 29.97 session to open those few files, they will import happily but end up in the wrong places on the timeline! The same problem is true if the timecode rates are reversed.

The solution is to kick this back to the assistant editor in the picture department, and make them first convert everything to the same framerate (whatever their main editing timebase is). Then have them re-create the AAF or OMF.

Sadly they can't always accommodate. So the only remaining option on the Pro Tools end is to import the AAF into several sessions (one at each timecode rate they used in their original mixed format timeline) to be sure you're getting everything, then import all the tracks from these sessions into one and start hand-synching.

[Brandonx1]

That might be what's happening but I can't get that solution done. budget, timeline is severely limited. No way to fix this? I've already had 10 different test aafs from this project. Nothing is working at all! Is there any program that I can edit in and export to PT for mixing. I only have a few days to get this going. Currently, the production company is thinking of track by track export. I'm going to be totally hosed if this is the case.

[paranerd]

Try lowering the handles when making the AAF. I noticed if the clips don't have audio at the length of the handle length, it will slip the audio in the clip to compensate which makes it completely out of sync.

A test to see if handle length is the issue is to make an AAF with 0 frames of handles. If everything seems fine after that, you know the issue is with the handles.

[Brandonx1]

Originally Posted by paranerd

Try lowering the handles when making the AAF. I noticed if the clips don't have audio at the length of the handle length, it will slip the audio in the clip to compensate which makes it completely out of sync.

A test to see if handle length is the issue is to make an AAF with 0 frames of handles. If everything seems fine after that, you know the issue is with the handles.

Tried that. Mostly worked but some clips still didn't come over correctly.

[paranerd]

Originally Posted by Brandonx1

Tried that. Mostly worked but some clips still didn't come over correctly.

OK. Have the video editor transcode the sequence with a handle length of 300 or 400 frames and have him/her export an AAF from that transcoded sequence. That should get the rest of the clips to work.

Edit: Make sure the audio is transcoded to WAV as well.

[marilo]

I´ve also have this problem with AAF´s coming from different versions of media composer. It seems to affect clips related to picture. All music and SFX-files is placed correctly.