exporting AAF from a merge clips timeline

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a 25-minute short film that was edited entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro.

During the editing process, I used Premiere’s Merge Clips function to combine the video and separately recorded audio. I later learned that Merge Clips is not the ideal workflow when the project needs to be handed over to a sound editor and exported as an AAF.

Now I’m at the sound post-production stage, and I’m having a major problem: I cannot get a usable AAF out of the project that correctly links back to the original production audio files.

I have tried a number of different approaches, including:

• Exporting the AAF with different settings.
• Embedding the audio vs. exporting separate audio files.
• Rendering/consolidating the audio files before exporting.
• Trying different handle/frame settings.
• Exporting the project as XML, importing it into DaVinci Resolve, and then exporting it back to Premiere, followed by another attempt to create an AAF.
• Relinking/reconnecting the media in different ways before exporting.

However, no matter what I try, the sound editor’s system cannot properly relink the audio to the original production sound files. In some cases, the AAF is created, but the audio clips are either incorrectly linked, truncated, or Premiere/Resolve does not preserve the relationship to the original audio files.

The project itself is already fully edited, and I really want to avoid rebuilding the entire timeline from scratch or manually replacing every piece of audio.

So my questions are:

Is there any reliable workflow for converting a Premiere project that was edited using Merge Clips into a proper AAF for a sound editor, while preserving/reconnecting the original production audio?

Is there a way to fix the project or reconstruct the correct audio relationships without having to redo the entire edit?

If anyone has encountered this specific problem with Merge Clips + AAF, I would really appreciate any advice or workflow that has worked for you.

Thanks!