Avid timeline into Premiere Pro MXF media

Report · Dec 22, 2021

I hope someone can help me with this peculiar situation. I have an old Avid project that I imported into Premiere Pro. The sequence imported fine by using AAF. However, because the Avid media which is MXF is split up into 2GB chunks, Premiere can only link up to the first piece of media before it has been split.

For example, a 10 minute clip shows up in the timeline as one single clip but in the Finder, the MXF media is broken up into 2GB chunks under the clip name and a long string of suffix. In the Premiere timeline, only the part portion of this clip is online (Premiere can only relink to the first media file and not the subsequent media files that makes up the rest of this long clip). So while the remaining portion of this clip appears in the timeline, the clip is marked with hash line. I've attached a screen shot below.

Does anyone know how I can get Premiere to relink to the rest of the MXF media? Thanks very much!

Report · Dec 27, 2021

Try this:

Create a new blank project and use the MEDIA BROWSER window to navigate to the folder containing your MXF files. Drag them from that window into your Project panel or right-click on them and select "Import." Hopefully this will bring in the full clips; Media Browser is the tool you want for joiing together spanned clips, as the regular Import command will not do that.

Then try importing the AAF and see if the clips connect correctly.

JVK

Report · Dec 30, 2021

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately this did not work. Using the Media Browser, importing the first portion of this spanned clip still only imported that singular clip. I have since been able to reconstruct the sequence by using source timecode, importing each spanned ckip into the browser as it's individual clip, and re-editing each clip back into the timeline by using Replace edit. It wasn't actually that hard to figure out, just a bit time consuming.

Though one thing I don't understand is that once I was able to reconstitiute the timeline, I exported an XML out of PP and into Resolve (out of curiosity) with the hope of then expoting an XML from Resolve into FCP X. Resolve imported the XML from PP and reconstructed the timeline but it was not able to properly link up the audio media. I had thought that since I imported each audio clip into PP and Replaced edited the old clip with the new clip, it should not have any leftover spanned clip metadata. But apparently it still does since Resolve was still confused by this XML and could not relink the audio media properly. This might be out of the depths of this forum but now I'm just curious why this won't import properly.

I was thinking about converting and exporting this all the way from Avid into FCPX via PP and Resolve but now I just may stay and edit this in PP.