AAF doesn't keep original metadata or filename

Report · Jan 23, 2020

Is there a way for an AAF to retain the original filenames and metadata of the audio from the sequence?

This edit I made has production audio as seperate mono WAV files, with each take having multiple clips with filenames that help show which are part of the same take, with usually one file being the Boom and other being Individual Lav Mikes. Below is a screenshot of how the raw production audio is labelled.

However, in every AAF I export, these filenames and their metadata aren't being retained. If I export the AAF with seperate audio, they're renamed as the mess of numbers and letters below, which keeps the Mixer from being able to cross reference with the labelled source audio.

And when the Mixer brings in either an Embedded or seperate AAF, all the audio clips, even if they have the proper waveforms, are randomly renamed to the first file, which in this case was the tone WAV used as a 2-pop. So every audio clip in his sequence, even if it's a music clip or a piece of production audio, is named after the 2pop file.

I've tried a myriad of diferent AAF export settings. Is there any way for AAFs in a Premiere to ProTools workflow to retain the correct source audio filenames and metadata? I don't remember this being a problem.

Report · Jun 10, 2020

I'm having this exact issue, did you ever find a solution?

Report · Dec 30, 2020

Me too. Same exact problem. Did you guys ever solve this??

Report · Dec 30, 2020

Hi Steven,

The short of it is, no. But, maybe my story would help as I did get past this for my specific purposes:

I was trying to get the audio edit from Premiere into Davinci Resolve, retaining all source files with best quality, and untrimmed files.

First, I got an OMF from Premiere into Audition. This OMF did not trim clips, so complete audio clips were transcoded to aiff. In Audition, the clip names appear as they did in Premiere (correctly) but inspecting the referenced source files, it was the crazy names as referenced above. I pushed forward...
From Audition, I was able to export an XML and import that into Resolve. All the clip names are now showing up as the crazy undesirable names.
So, in Resolve I updated the “clip name” field for each clip by visually referencing the Audition session. This was quite manual. I went clip by clip-- in Audition I’d long press to select and copy the clip name, and in the Resolve timeline, I’d right click on the corresponding clip and go to Clip Attributes, where’d I’d update the clip name with a paste. This is visually coherent, so that I can continue the organization/edit in Resolve.
At this point, my next step is to prep for a mix. I've organized my tracks by character, fx, and score. But I know I'm still going to have those crazy transcoded file names when I export. There must be some way to harness the clip re-naming legwork on export out of Resolve, but I 'spose this is where I must switch forums.... I know I can spit out ALL the clips used in the edit and tell it to name them by their new “clip name.” But it seems like reconforming these newly renamed audio files will still be somewhat “by hand.”