Avid 5-5 AMA & Exporting AAF Now Works

Little Frog in Hi Def

A little less than a year ago, I reviewed the new Avid Media Composer v5 software. Buried in that otherwise good review…at the bottom of the review…I mentioned that even though AMA was cool and nice, you couldn’t export an AAF or OMF from a project that contained AMA material. You’d get an error stating that the media needed to be Avid media in order to export an AAF. This pretty much put the breaks on my wonderful plans to capture in FCP (to ProRes), import those files into Avid Media Composer via AMA…edit them…and then export the cut via AAF, import back into FCP via Automatic Duck Pro Import 2.o (zero quality loss, as it would reference the same media you captured with FCP), then take that into COLOR to color correct, and then finish and output with FCP. There are a few reasons for wanting to do this, but I won’t go into that now…later.

Well…now you CAN do that. And thanks to Twitter, and the great community of Twitter people I follow, I found out how.

Twitter person @jayfriesen (fellow Montanan) was complaining that he couldn’t export an AAF with footage he imported via AMA. That this was a huge workflow hole that needed to be fixed. He has a Twitter follower named @joshpetok who chimed in; “did you try using a linked AAF and turn on the ‘use AAF edit protocol’ checkbox?” Well, I have done that before, and it still didn’t work. I thought I did anyway. Well, that got people in that tweet bundle (group of people tagged in a tweet) to have this discussion between ourselves like “Really? Serious? it works?” and “Why didn’t the beta folks tell us about this” and “I am on the beta and I knew nothing about this.” And so on.

Well, I tested it. Guess what. IT WORKS! read more...