Headache getting Avid to take Premiere Pro AAFs :-(

[Mike Barber]

Our cameras are Sony XDCAM EX3 (shooting XDCAM EX). Some of our feild producer/editors are cutting in either Premiere Pro CS5.5 or FCP7. We're starting to package these little pieces into a longer magazine-type formate which I am finishing in Avid MC5.

I'm testing the workflow and am hitting a wall... this is my workflow so far:

Working in PPro5.5, the media is straight from the XDCAM EX BPAV folders (copied from the SxS cards to local RAID). I cut a short sequence with 8 mono audio tracks (clip audio, VO, wild BG audio, music) and then export AAF from PPro (tried with and without "Legacy" option enabled, results appear same).

Due to working with XDCAM in its native formate in PPro, before going to Avid I have been adding the step of going in to Sony XDCAM EX ClipBrowser and exporting the clips to generic MXFs for relinking/importing in the next step...

In Avid MC 5.5.3, I import the AAF and then batch import the MXF clips (as an aside, YTF does Avid make me select every single clip source individually... they're all in the same folder! this is dumb). Here's where things get wonkey...

The video reconnects just is fine. The audio is a bloody mess! Here's how audio is organized on my timeline:

A1 & A2 = clip audio corresponding to V1
A3 & A4 = clip audio corresponding to V2
A5 = VO
A6 = BG or other auxillary sound
A7 & A8 = music

The only audio that seems to reconnect is A1. A2 remains offline for some reason. The rest don't appear offline, but their respective clipnames on the timeline text are empty, just the duration (if I enable Clip Text > Media File Names, I get "n/a").

If I try to play the sequence, I get this error:


Exception: Sequence refers to non-existent track in clip.
Please turn off monitoring and re-edit references to the following clip.
You may then re-enable monitoring.
, clip: (name of file on A7&A8), missingTrack:A256


I have no idea what any of that means or how to move forward. Any ideas? I'm starting to panic a bit.