AAF import stereo issue

[Kaister]

Hi everyone,

I'm experiencing a new issue when importing aaf files from adobe premiere pro. Clips that are clearly in stereo in premiere only appear in mono in pro tools.

We regularly bounce stems for our picture editors, they edit them, and send them back an aaf file. I discovered, that some of these clips are only in mono after the import. The audio on the left track is the same as on the right track, in both "STEM3_01.wav_L-01" and "STEM3_01.wav_R-01".
This only happens to some of the clips. I had one session with just 1 clip "monoed", other sessions with multiple instances.

Re-importing the aaf in premiere always gives the original stereo.

I've got different results with PT 2022.12 and 2022.10 on different machines. With 2022.10, at least for now, I get less "monoed" clips.

Does anybody experience similar problems? I couldn't find any similar threads.

Cheers
Kai

[made]

AAF in general supports stereo files, but it has been common practice to only use mono because ProTools doesn't support stereo files in AAF.

That's why most video editing software will split to mono when exporting for ProTools.

I think in recent versions of ProTools stereo seems to work, but I never found that documented anywhere, so it could be a luck or a special setting in the video software (Premiere in my case) or a combination of both...

[alexbooy]

Hi Kai,
When I imported an AAF from Premiere a month ago, I found out that some clips from original multitrack recordings ( Mid, Side, Tx, Tx) sometimes turned into 4 times the same clip (Side, Side,Side,Side). There was no reason why some clips acted normal and some acted strange.
I asked the editor to make an AAF whitout stereo tracks (music), and only production sound.
I decided to double click on the AAF icon, making it a Protools session. Having this session Not Interleaved. This gave me the correct translation of the AAF.
After that, I imported these ProTools tracks into my template. (Not Interleaved).
This worked for me.

The editor used an M1 computer. He thinks that PremiereAAF isn’t ready for a proper AAF export.

Alex

[gives]

Originally Posted by Kaister

Hi everyone,

I'm experiencing a new issue when importing aaf files from adobe premiere pro. Clips that are clearly in stereo in premiere only appear in mono in pro tools.

We regularly bounce stems for our picture editors, they edit them, and send them back an aaf file. I discovered, that some of these clips are only in mono after the import. The audio on the left track is the same as on the right track, in both "STEM3_01.wav_L-01" and "STEM3_01.wav_R-01".
This only happens to some of the clips. I had one session with just 1 clip "monoed", other sessions with multiple instances.

Re-importing the aaf in premiere always gives the original stereo.

I've got different results with PT 2022.12 and 2022.10 on different machines. With 2022.10, at least for now, I get less "monoed" clips.

Does anybody experience similar problems? I couldn't find any similar threads.

Cheers
Kai

I recently had AAF's sent to me for several film cues from LA to import and a lot of the Multicam dialogue was not there from Premiere. So, they flattened it, (something the editor did), and then they all cam in, but because of that some of the dialogue had phase issues. So I had them just send me either stems or do the export in OMF, which I don't prefer, but I think it had to possibly do with the version of Premiere maybe. Like they had not updated theirs and maybe Pro vs non Pro ver. You learn something new everyday on this job-:)

G

[trevora]

Originally Posted by Kaister

Does anybody experience similar problems? I couldn't find any similar threads.

Cheers
Kai

https://m.facebook.com/groups/adobep...2661552795414/ - unclear if related but this chap has some stereo timeline clips appearing as dual mono in pro tools.

[minister]

I think it is more on the Premiere side. There are some really convoluted aspects to how Premiere handles audio -- there are "standard" tracks and mono and stereo and "adaptive"... And if the editor starts mixing types of audio files on tracks it can lead to odd things being passed on to PT, like 4 mono channels for one source.

[trevora]

I think Adobe did quite a bit of work on this. Other than multicams, that were built wrong by an assistant, I've not had reports back from ProTools folks about AAFs for a few years.

If your PP editors use standard tracks then the AAF export will split them to _L and _R timeline tracks for the stereo and a separate track for the mono elements.

This seems to be an error introduced recently - and it'll maybe go unnoticed unless the PT folk know that the source material is stereo, rather than dual mono (IE the OP is roundtripping stems).

Adobe are pretty good at introducing errors, but then Avid aren't too shabby in that respect either.

[gives]

Originally Posted by minister

I think it is more on the Premiere side. There are some really convoluted aspects to how Premiere handles audio -- there are "standard" tracks and mono and stereo and "adaptive"... And if the editor starts mixing types of audio files on tracks it can lead to odd things being passed on to PT, like 4 mono channels for one source.

It totally is as I have spoken to the editors about it.

Not a Pt issue at all that I can see.

G

[gives]

Originally Posted by trevora

I think Adobe did quite a bit of work on this. Other than multicams, that were built wrong by an assistant, I've not had reports back from ProTools folks about AAFs for a few years.

If your PP editors use standard tracks then the AAF export will split them to _L and _R timeline tracks for the stereo and a separate track for the mono elements.

This seems to be an error introduced recently - and it'll maybe go unnoticed unless the PT folk know that the source material is stereo, rather than dual mono (IE the OP is roundtripping stems).

Adobe are pretty good at introducing errors, but then Avid aren't too shabby in that respect either.

Yes, The multi-cams are the issue I ran into in the last week with AAF only.

G

[trevora]

The multicam issue is where the multicams are built incorrectly in premiere (it's easy to do wrong). Everything sounds fine in the edit but on export to AAF (where PP flattens to the constituent files) you may get silence, or the wrong tracks (eg cam mic not lavs).

Easiest workaround (other than building multicams correctly) seems to be to export an OMF (which seems to bounce the multicam bus output, rather than consolidate its sources.

It's more a PP multicam problem, rather than an AAF problem (as you get the same problem in the PP timeline if you flatten it*).

The dual mono issue seems to be an AAF problem, TBD if it's prem export or PT import at fault. (Although OP did say that importing offending AAF back into PP was stereo.)

*Although you say your editor fixed it by flattening? So maybe this is a different PP bug.