Looking for an X2Pro alternative?

First, an honest note

If you already own X2Pro, it works and your facility knows it, there is no reason to change.

X2Pro (Marquis Broadcast) has been the reference since around 2012. It is cited in the workflow documentation of film schools, in the Avid community, and in most of the tutorials you will find on the subject. That track record has real value: when a delivery goes wrong at 11 pm, a tool everyone around you already uses is worth something.

Where X2Pro remains the better choice: when your studio has already validated and documented it, when your workflow depends on features outside a plain AAF delivery, or when your team simply knows its quirks by heart. Changing tools for the sake of changing costs more than it saves.

For its current feature list and pricing, go to the source — x2pro.net. We will not describe a competitor's product in its place, and prices change.

What to check in any FCPXML to AAF converter

Six questions. They are the ones that decide whether the mixer starts working or starts tidying up.

1. Do roles become named tracks?

This is the whole point of organising your edit. If your roles arrive as an anonymous stack of regions, you paid for nothing.

AAFx: every role and subrole becomes a named track. Dialogue opens the session, then the roles you created, then effects, then music. Overlapping clips of the same role take neighbouring sub-tracks rather than piling up.

2. Is the source timecode of each region preserved?

Without it, conforming months later — when the picture changes and the mix has to follow — becomes guesswork.

AAFx: each region carries the original timecode of its source file. This is the feature the sound department cares about most, and the one that is least often advertised.

3. Can you control the handles?

Handles are the audio kept before and after each cut, so the sound editor can rebuild a transition without asking you for the rushes.

AAFx: a slider from zero to thirty seconds, with an estimate of the resulting file size before you commit.

4. Are multichannel sources split into mono?

Pro Tools only reads mono audio essence inside an AAF. Give it an interleaved stereo region and it reads the samples with the wrong stride: the result is saturated noise, even though the embedded audio is intact. If you have ever opened an AAF and heard white noise, this is why.

AAFx: every source is split into one mono track per channel, and beyond stereo, channels carrying only silence are discarded. A 16-track field recording does not flood your session with 16 empty tracks.

5. Are multicam and compound clips resolved?

A magazine episode can be made almost entirely of multicam clips. If the converter takes only the first audio angle, you get silence where someone was speaking.

AAFx: every active audio angle is carried over, disabled ones are ignored, and compound clips are expanded. Clips whose audio you switched off in the edit stay out of the AAF.

6. What happens when a drive is offline?

It always happens, usually the evening of the delivery.

AAFx: it names each missing file, its role, how many clips use it and which volume it expects. Point it at a folder and it relinks by source timecode and exact duration — never by filename, so two rushes with the same name from two shooting days cannot be swapped.

And the free route: DaVinci Resolve

It deserves to be mentioned, because it works and costs nothing.

You can import your FCPXML into DaVinci Resolve and export an AAF from there. Many tutorials recommend it, and for a short project it is a perfectly reasonable answer.

What it costs you: the roles you carefully built in Final Cut do not survive as named tracks, handles are awkward to control, and you go through a full round trip in a third application — importing, checking, exporting — for every version of the cut. On a 26-minute episode with 485 clips, that is an afternoon rather than a few minutes.

What AAFx costs

Every download starts with a complete seven-day trial: nothing is disabled, no watermark, no credit card. Try it on a real project before deciding — that is the only comparison that counts.