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AAF from Avid
Hello all,
I’ve never had any success whatsoever getting AAFs from Avid into Vegas 6 but on noticing the trial of v7 available i thought i’d give it another go…the result? hmmm. Vegas now reads the AAF and brings a composition of sorts in but then gets bogged down in all kinds of nonsense. When exporting AAF from Avid (in this case MC Soft 2.5.3) you have various options including link to current media, copy media to new location or consolidate and embed in AAF. The last is the option i tried first as it’s what’s commonly used when sending OMFs to audio facilities. The problem seems to be that even when consolidating and embedding, which involves creating new files with specified handles rather than referencing the original media, Vegas seems to somehow seeing a link to the original location of media BEFORE it was even imported into the Avid (the avid stores the location of original files so you can batch import if you need to later).
Therefore, on import of an AAF into Vegas 7 you get a varying number of ‘media offline, search for media’ dialogs coming up, depending on whether your source media still exists or is in the same location etc. And yes Vegas is looking for the original source media, NOT the media consolidated into new files that is actually contained within the AAF itself. very weird. Possibly a lovely new bug. Have tried all permutations of AAF export on result is generally the same. In one case, with consolidate and embed, one of the original source audio tracks was an hour and a half long. It was still ‘online’ in the original location it had been imported from so Vegas found it automatically and then began ‘building peaks’ for about five mins. Ridiculous aaf itself was only 5 mins in length and had a consolidated version of this track embedded in it.
Would be grateful to hear any thoughts
George
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5 Replies
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Vegas can deal with both legacy AAFs and “edit Protocol” AAFs from more modern AVIDs. The most typical user problems in the AVID AAF Out> Vegas AAF In are
a) making sure that all needed codecs and formats are on the machine and are supported by both apps
and
b) media re-linking.
Assuming you are doing this on a single machine where the AVID codecs are installed, you might try exporting all (trimmed ok) media to a folder, and then exporting an AAF file without embedded media, into the same folder. When you import that AAF into Vegas, Vegas will typically ask for the location of the first piece of media to be relinked and then will automatically find the rest (since it is in the same folder).
If this doesn’t work, it would be nice to know the format of the media your AVID is writing. If it is is AVID .MXF, that could be a problem- Vegas 7 does not support AVID MXF source types at this time (this is an AVID-only flavor of MXF). You might then look at having AVID write .avi or QT files during the export/consolidate.
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Thanks for your reply Dr. D! I was sort of aware of the video issues so I’ve have done all my tests (but one) using wav audio media. In the one test i did with MXF DV Vegas gave an error saying it couldn’t use the file. I believe what your suggesting will be almost the same as one of the AAF export settings itself, ie copy media to new location, which I am already tried with same results. But as you suggest I will try later as a two stage process, doing a straight consolidate of the sequence to one folder and then doing an AAF which just links to that new media. Do I understand that correctly? Shame it can’t happen in one go.
Also I forgot to mention previously that though the AAF timelines themselves seemed correct and the cuts were in the right place sequentially, the media that had come though or been found by Vegas was often the wrong section of track, and parts of the same track were repeated instead of following the cuts in that track. hope that makes sense, hard to word!George
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OK so just did a simple consolidation of wav audio in a sequence, about 8 tracks. I consolidated first to a fresh folder, then exported an AAF which linked to that media. Then i imported this into Vegas. I got the same messages; Vegas is looking for the original source media rather than the consolidated avid media which is completely different. As a result no media is found by Vegas. Also I noticed no timecode comes through, is it supposed too?
Ollie
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You might try re-opening the project with in AVID, making sure that you are indeed referencing the consolidated media. Re-export the AAF, re-open in Vegas. You may be able to manually relink if Vegas isn’t picking up the paths automatically (it should, if paths didn’t change)
Timecode in source files will not be read.
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Thanks for the speedy response. Just tried importing the AAF back into the avid and it worked fine, came back identically and correctly linked to the consolidated media. also it had retained sequence timecode. I don’t need individual clip TC but sequence timecode is a must.
Indeed, though Vegas seems to always be searching for the original source media, I can obivously manually tell it what media to use but it’s not a great workaround, especially if i’m dealing with something that has a lavish tracklay and lots of clips.
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