When the AAF arrives wrong

Pro Tools plays white noise instead of your audio

The most common one, and the most alarming: the session opens, the regions are there, and every one of them is saturated noise.

The cause. Pro Tools only reads mono audio essence inside an AAF. Hand it a region holding interleaved stereo and it walks through the samples with the wrong stride — each 24-bit sample is read straddling two real ones. The result is a continuous digital noise, even though the embedded audio is perfectly intact.

You can prove it to yourself: extract the WAV that went into the AAF and open it in Audacity. It sounds fine. Nothing was damaged; it is being read wrong.

The fix. Every source has to be split into one mono track per channel before the AAF is written. AAFx does this automatically, and goes further: beyond stereo it discards channels carrying only silence, so a 16-track field recording does not flood your session with 16 empty tracks.

The media is offline as soon as you open the session

The cause. The AAF references external files instead of carrying them. It opens fine on the machine that made it — the paths still resolve — and comes up empty everywhere else.

The fix. Deliver a self-contained AAF: the audio essence travels inside the file. A mixer who has never seen your rushes opens it and hears everything, with nothing to relink.

The file is bigger, obviously. That is the point of a delivery.

Your roles arrive as an anonymous stack of regions

The cause. Either the converter ignores roles entirely, or the route you took loses them. Going through DaVinci Resolve is the usual case: the FCPXML carries your roles, but the AAF that comes out the other side does not keep them as named tracks.

That is the whole cost of the free route. You organised your edit carefully, and the mixer receives an unlabelled pile.

The fix. A converter that reads the FCPXML directly can map every role and subrole to a named track. Look at the ordering too — dialogue should open the session, not sit between two music beds.

Multicam audio is missing where someone was speaking

The cause. A multicam clip can carry sound on several angles at once, and editors routinely disable some of them. A converter that keeps only the first active angle returns silence whenever that angle happens to be a quiet one — while another active angle carried the speech.

This is a real bug we found and fixed in AAFx: it retained the first active angle and stopped there. It now resolves every active angle and ignores the disabled ones.

How to spot it. Compare the Final Cut timeline with the session on the exact spots where someone talks over a multicam. Silence there, sound in Final Cut, and you have it.

The session has far more tracks than your timeline

Two reasons are legitimate. The third is a bug, and it is spectacular.

Legitimate. Every stereo source becomes two mono tracks — see the noise problem above. And clips of the same role that overlap in time need separate sub-tracks; they cannot share one.

The bug. If the converter does not trim the contents of a container clip to its own start and duration, a nine-second clip holding a twenty-six-minute rush pours the entire rush into the session. On a real magazine episode we measured 20 113 seconds of dialogue for a 1 925-second programme — ten times too much material, stacked, producing 26 dialogue tracks where 5 were needed.

Final Cut's own multicam and compound clips were trimmed correctly; plain <clip> containers were not. It is now fixed, and the same episode comes out at 30 tracks instead of 112.

How to spot it. If a track holds one region several minutes long in a fast-cut programme, something upstream is not trimming.

Sounds you muted in the edit come back in the AAF

The cause. Final Cut marks a clip whose audio you switched off with srcEnable="video". A converter that reads this attribute at the top level but forgets it inside compound clips will happily export audio you deliberately removed — including, in one case we hit, a full programme master laid on the timeline as a reference.

The fix. The attribute has to be honoured everywhere: plain clips, compound clips and multicam angles alike. AAFx now reports how many clips were excluded for this reason, before you convert.

Nothing above matches your problem

Write to support@aafx.app. It is answered by the person who wrote the code, usually within a working day. Send the FCPXML if you can — most of these causes are visible in it without needing your media at all.