Retaining Avid Pan settings when Importing AAF into Ptools?

[NK]

Hello,
I am working on a show where the editor is giving me exports of all audio tracks from the avid as AAF.
I am importing the AAF into protools and I need to retain the avid Volume and Pan settings,
The volume settings are imported ok although I see no Pan automation being retained.
Does anyone here know if you can retain Panning automation from the Avid to import into protools with my sequence?

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

[NK]

Strange, One of our Ptools rigs (7.3 LE with DV toolkit) opens the AAF retaining volume automation but shows no panning information, While our HD rig (7.3x) is giving us a error message ""cannot handle pan automation over segment boundaries".
hmmmm. Any ideas?

[Richard Fairbanks]

I don't know about that error message, but pan automation should come across (assuming you have enabled it to be retained on the import page).

Have you opened your aaf in an Avid to see if there is indeed pan automation? If you don't have easy access to an Avid, email me the aaf file without media (I hope it is not full of embeded media!). I can import it into Avid Express Pro. Maybe we can learn something. The last time I looked closely at it, Avid initial pan settings were not retained, only panpot changes. In other words, if a couple of tracks were panned left/right, and never moved, then no pan automation would show up. As I said, its been a long while since I looked at it so this might have changed.

[NK]

Hi Richard, Thanks so much for the information!
We do have some avids here and on the avid you can see there are multiple clips containing different pan settings.
I am exporting the tracks from the avid AAF, embedded. I try and open this in protools, in the protools import window I am selecting "Convert Clip based gain to volume automation" and I am de-selecting "Pan odd tracks left and even tracks right"

once the AAF opens in ptools if I look at the tracks volume automation I can see that it has translated although the pan automation has not.
Per all the documentation it appears that I should be able to see the pan automation although it just is not happening here.

Avid Adernaline MC v2.7
Protools HD 7.3 (Digitranslator)
Protools LE 7.3 (DV toolkit)

[minister]

and I am de-selecting "Pan odd tracks left and even tracks right"

could be as richard says, or, my other not particularly deep thought is, by doing this, are you telling digitranslator to ignore pan automation?

[NK]

By keeping the "Pan odd tracks left even tracks right" checked it will do just that.
Hard Pan Left any audio on odd track numbers and hard pan Right all audio on even tracks. We need to keep the custom pan settings that have been made on a clip per clip basses on the Avid. This setting will not retain that. Thanks for the suggestion though!

[Richard Fairbanks]

I cannot get pans to import either! This feature was working in 7.1 but with 7.3 HD I cannot get any pan data at all when importing from Avid or from Pro Tools aaf export (compatibility checked or not). The import filter is definitely checked to allow pan data import. It might be a bug. Digi?

[NK]

Wow, This is bad news for me.
I was hoping there was a quick fix. Hopefully we can get this bug fixed soon.
Now I need to figure out how to go back to version 7.1, I will probably just install a clean OS and 7.1 on a standalone drive.

[potatohead]

I just tried this on PT7.2cs1 and the clip-based panning is NOT importing from the AAF. I don't have access to v7.1 here, but I can confirm that 7.2cs1 doesn't do it.

Digi, are you out there?

-Phil

[DigiTechSupt]

After looking at the AAF in an Avid, it appears that the sequence contains keyframe pan data (as indicated by the pink triangles). Pro Tools only supports the import of clip-based pan automation.

That said, it appears that there may be an issue with importing clip-based pan into Pro Tools, as we're able to reproduce the problem using a new sequence with only clip-based pan. We are investigating and will report back when we know more.

Best,
Jordan Glasgow
Video Test Engineer
Digidesign

P.S. Good to hear from you NK! We'll have to grab a beer one of these times.