Hey Folks,
first of all thanks to the ardour community! its such a great daw and im happy to use ardour for all my sound work!
one thing: I work a lot for movie postproduction and stuff and theres always the question how to import a complete avid session… there was the old sound design 2 / .sd2 format and theres a new one… is there some way to import the complete session or a way to encode ist to a new one…?? thanks for help!
The standard way to move sessions between different DAWs is to export each track as single BWF file (“stems”) and them import them back into the target system. Currently Ardour makes the export process a bit more cumbersome than it need be, but the import process is very simple - you can just drag-n-drop all the BWF files from your avid system into a new Ardour session and it will create new tracks with all the audio in the right place.
Ardour can handle SD2 files directly as well, but this may not result in the arrangement of audio you are expecting if your original avid session was edited in anyway.
Alright, thats a good advice, i will try that… for me its more importing, and i wondered if i import a bwf if ardour handles all the backgroundinfo… but ill try… THX!
I’ve written a module that can import AAF sessions into Ardour but at the moment it’s only free to certain groups of people (other Ardour developers, translators, beta testers and regular Ardour contributers). I’m looking for beta testers at the moment but you’d need to be able to build Ardour from source. Let me know if you want to try it.
Unfortunately I don´t have the skills for that, but hopefully you´ll find some people who can do that! 
Hi John,
if i can handle Avid AAF files in ardour it would be great.
There is not so much (opensource)software witch is able to handle AAF.
Is this module only working with AAF embedded media or also with reference media. And witch kind of media… Audio: wave, aiff, pcm? … Video: MXF?
Thank you for that work. I hope to find this feature in one of the next ardour releases.
Hi Raumundzeit. The AAF module is essentially a plugin that runs under Windows - i.e. you can run it using Wine (or Crossover Mac if you run Ardour on OS-X). Audio-wise it currently imports embedded media in wav, aiff or pcm format (with handles). It doesn’t import video since Ardour has nowhere to put it.
If you’re running Ardour on a Debian based distro I believe there will soon be a Debian installer package. Otherwise, you need to apply some patches to Ardour and rebuild from source. I’m hoping that the patches will one day be accepted upline but that seems to be a lengthier process than I’d hoped. One particular problem is finding beta testers. I’ve tested it as much as I can but I haven’t been ables to test it at all with OS-X, nor with dropframe timecode. Anyone who could help with testing would be most welcome.
Hi John,
if you want, i can help to test the modul.
Actually i’m running Ubuntu 8.04 64 and arch linux 32. but it is not problem to install any other linux on my system.
I have no Mac testsystem. But under linux there is no Problem. At work, the 40 Avidsystems running Windows and our ProTools systems are mac based produvtive systems… i can’t test anything on these systems. I’m happy if they run ProTools without problems 
my e-mail is raumundzeit@gmx.de.