Media Composer AAF clips referencing incorrect section of media

[David McCarthy]

We do a lot of promo work and one of our main clients cuts on Media Composer and sends us AAFs and reference videos. This works fine almost all the time. Just recently we've had a few where some of the clips are playing back the wrong part of the audio. The clip is in the correct spot, but the audio within it is out. The latest occurrences (two yesterday) had, in the first case, all the audio on one pair of tracks starting ten frames late and, in the second, two pairs of clips starting twenty frames early.

To try and explain more clearly: imagine a line of dialogue such as "it's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" and the desired edit gives "it's a riddle wrapped in a mystery" placed at, say, 00:05:14 to 00:07:03 in the timeline. Upon opening the AAF in Pro Tools, we find the clip in the correct spot (00:05:14 to 00:07:03) but the audio is "apped in a mystery inside an en".

The problem media is cut from TV programs and films. Music and SFX laid up by the editor are fine. I believe they are running the latest version of MC. We are on PT 10.3.5 on TDM systems but I have also tested it on PT 11 on my laptop with the same result. The only workaround so far (apart from manually repositioning and ear-matching, which isn't too onerous on 30sec promos...) is by opening the AAF in MC (an older version) on my laptop and re-exporting a new AAF. The client has also tried that but the problem remained. In their case, rather than a laptop, they are trying on a different server volume so they can't be unintentionally referencing the original media.

Has anyone see anything like this? I have seen similar problems with frame-rate and sample-rate mismatches but that doesn't seem to be the case here. In the second example where only two pairs of clips were out, all the clips were cut from the same media.

[philper]

This used to be a common issue in the old Media Composer days, and was usually down to original clips having problematic TC metadata. i have no fix for you other than your manual placement--that's what we had to do.

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by David McCarthy

Just recently we've had a few where some of the clips are playing back the wrong part of the audio. The clip is in the correct spot, but the audio within it is out.

Which version of Pro Tools are you using? v10.3.x?

[David McCarthy]

Originally Posted by Chief Technician

Which version of Pro Tools are you using? v10.3.x?

I did say 10.3.5 but it's actually 10.3.10.

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by David McCarthy

I did say 10.3.5 but it's actually 10.3.10.

This was supposedly fixed in v10.3.10. After importing AAF from Media Composer, some audio does not match the video. (PTSW-194124).

Do you have access to v11.2.1 or later?

[David McCarthy]

Originally Posted by Chief Technician

This was supposedly fixed in v10.3.10. After importing AAF from Media Composer, some audio does not match the video. (PTSW-194124).

Do you have access to v11.2.1 or later?

As I said, I got the same result on PT 11 on my laptop. It is running 11.3.1.

[gwhatley]

A few times I've seen something like this when time expansion has been applied to a clip in Media composer. Could something like that be possible? Or even more generally, were there any rendered effects in editorial, even something as innocuous as EQ, that might point you in some direction?

Sent from my LG-H830 using Tapatalk

[David McCarthy]

Originally Posted by Chief Technician

This was supposedly fixed in v10.3.10. [B]After importing AAF from Media Composer, some audio does not match the video. (PTSW-194124).

I can find nothing definitive about that bug fix but most discussion seems to involve very small sync issues. Here, we are looking at ten to twenty frames in either direction.

[David McCarthy]

Originally Posted by gwhatley

A few times I've seen something like this when time expansion has been applied to a clip in Media composer. Could something like that be possible? Or even more generally, were there any rendered effects in editorial, even something as innocuous as EQ, that might point you in some direction?

Thanks, Gerrard. No, nothing like that. I just rechecked with the editor. All clips are as per source.

[Vedat]

This is a bug that affects ProTools up to 12.5 I believe.
And it's fixed after that.

Basically latest versions of MC outputs AAFs that PT can't line up properly.
Someone had mentioned that it may have something to do with mixed frame rates on the Edit timeline where it wasn't allowed in previous versions of MC.

We set up a 12.5 station just to open AAFs, sigh.