Premiere scrambles audio channels on MXF import

Hello,

I'm experiencing an issue with Premiere where it seems that Premiere is unable to correctly arrange audio channels when importing multi-channel MXF footage. Our workflow involves using Avid media and we try to start and finish all our projects in Media Composer in case a client requests Avid sequences, while doing most of the editing work in Premiere. Naturally this has been causing problems with migration of footage back and forth, but this is the main issue I can't figure out a workaround for.

We get a lot of 12-channel split footage. Avid recognizes these and lines them up correctly. However, when we bring the footage into Premiere, it either can't tell the channels apart at all or it scrambles them into a random order that doesn't correspond to what they are supposed to be. This causes problems when bringing a sequence back to Avid later, because MC retains the correct channel information and all the sound bites or effects we may have used are coming in as the wrong (or, technically, correct) channels.

We've tried two methods of importing footage:

1) Importing the MXF files (in this case, 13 files, one being the video file and the 12 audio channels) directly into Premiere. Premiere recognizes them all as independent files, and if we build a sequence out of these and line them up correctly, each audio file is considered it's own Channel 1. If we export this sequence as an AAF and bring it back to Media Composer, it only sees the first "real" channel 1 and ignores all the others and sets them as offline files. This method wouldn't work either way because Avid sees the 13 files as a single piece of footage no matter what.

2) The more reliable method has been to first create a sequence out of the footage in Avid, and then export that as an AAF to bring into Premiere. With this method, Premiere does see all 13 files as a single piece of footage like Avid, and each audio file is seen as a separate channel. This is where it gets strange though - the channels are in the wrong order! They do not correspond to what they were in Avid or what's on the slate. This makes it impossible to work with audio. For example, if we use a sound bite that lives on Channel 1 of the footage, but Premiere thinks it's Channel 4 (which we use to edit it in Premiere), Avid then thinks we were using the "real" Channel 4 and so the audio we get when we bring it back in MC is something else entirely, like room tone or whatever is actually on Channel 4.

Is there any way around this issue? It's a bit confusing so I hope I laid it out in a way that makes sense. Many of our clients request deliveries to be done from Avid but some editors prefer to work in Premiere, so this has been causing problems.

Thanks in advance,

Ed