AAF Import Feature Testing

I’m not sure if there’ll be another v8 release or if we’re waiting for v9 now but does anyone know roughly when it’s due? It’d be nice to see an official release with AAF import working. Last I heard, it was fixed in the nightlies - but for whatever reason, people seem reluctant to use the nightly builds (maybe due to lack of support?)

Ardour 8.7 next week or so…

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Many thanks @Daniele1971 - I just downloaded the last nightly build and tried a few AAF imports here and they’re still working. I’ll try a few more tomorrow.

We still need a proper GUI for AAF import, but that’s a different story.

Yes, I’ve a feeling Harrison won’t implement AAF for Mixbus until there’s a proper GUI :unamused:

wow, with aaf import (I did that once upon a time with ardourxchange) and region-fx I would move my audio-post back to ardour :slight_smile:

Hold on, are you saying that Mixbus maintainers disabled AAF support?

Yes, it is no available in Mixbus releases.

and hasn’t been available for several years. The main options used to be ArdourXchange and AATranslator but both were only ever Windows products and needed Wine to run on the other platforms. What happened was that the Wine developers decided on a complete re-write and guess what… it didn’t work! So Mixbus’s AAF feature needed to get replaced by alternatives - such as stem imports and ProTools import.

And both have been helpful at introducing Mixbus to the music market which is a much bigger market than its original inroads which were (predominantly) audio post. But both DAWs have long supported video so it’d be nice to get AAF back in the mix. :smile:

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@calimerox / @prokoudine - if either of you gets a chance one day, would you mind trying the new AAF import feature in Ardour 8.7? It can be a bit tricky to find so the simplest option might be to try it from the New Session dialog. I’d definitely be interested to hear if it works okay for you guys…

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Hi John, just read this now,

I did a quick test and it “almost” worked. So all tracks show up, but the audio is missing except a few snippets. … they play back nicely. not sure what the problem could be, as there is a little bit of everything working…

This week I will try with some other aaf sessions and will let you know

Thanks for trying. The deveoper was a member here called @agfline so hopefully he might join us here.

@John_E,

Sorry for the OT question but in your screenshot that is a very unique window decoration theme, I’m curious what it is and what DE/WM you’re using? I geek out on that kind of stuff…

@GMaq - I’m running Windows 10 here but I don’t like the ‘blocky’ look of Win10 so I use something called WindowBlinds which makes it a bit easier on the eyes!

@calimerox - can you remember where the non-working AAF came from? e.g. Avid / ProTools / Nuendo or whatever?

they come from premiere, and I imported them before with no issues (well some fades changed etc…) into davinci resolve

Phew, that’s quite a relief! I don’t know about Adrien (@agfline) but I took a look through my various test files and I don’t have any AAFs here which came from Premiere. So it’s likely we’ve just never had the chance to test them…

I’m wondering if you’ve somewhere where you could upload the faulty AAF so we could try it? Maybe in a zip file if that’d make it easier?

Hi @John_E, Hi @calimerox

Thanks for reporting this issue.

Some lightweight test files are available in the libaaf repos and all those starting with PR_* are from Premiere.

If @calimerox had no issue importing into Resolve and not into Ardour, that’s obviously an issue with libaaf.

Just like John said, we’d need an AAF file to work on. If your file is too heavy for you to send, could you reproduce the “faulty” AAF file with Premiere, in a smaller file ?

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Hi Adrien - I spent this morning importing your PR_* AAF’s here and although they all produced an Ardour session, none of the sessions contained any clips on the timeline.

[Edit…] Apologies… for your 2 x 'Internal’ AAF’s the audio was present. It was just a tiny tone blip (after the timeline’s End marker - so it didn’t get played and I only just saw it)

There was no audio for the non-embedded samples though. And another oddity was that all 3 sessions got created with a sample rate of 22050Hz - even though your WAVs and AIFFs are either 48KHz or 44.1 - so I’m guessing there must be some weirdness going on within the Premiere exports.

@John_E If it would help, when I have some time, I will import some of these into Cubase 12 or 13 and see what the results are.

AAF files in the libaaf repos are first intended for testing with the library (using aaftool / test.py), to check all the specific file structures produced by various editing software. Thus, those files might not always be relevant in actual import tests.

Regarding sample rate, since AAF doesn’t hold any metadata for project sample rate, libaaf checks all essence files, then select the sample rate with the highest occurrence. Not sure if this is the best way to go… but that’s how it works right now. And FWIW, most editing software (Avid MC, ProTools, Resolve, even LogicPro) will export all essences with the same unique sample rate. I’ve only seen Premiere pro exporting different sample rates so far…

You can, but I usually test libaaf against each AAF test file before I do any update into Ardour. However if you have time, it might be interesting to export a few AAF files from Cubase, since I had no chance to test it yet :wink: There a a LOT of things to test per editing software, so let me know if you have time and I’ll list those for you.