Pro Tools OMF vs AAF

[osa]

Curious if someone might help me understand the pro's n con's of OMF vs AAF imports in pro tools. I have been using OMF for ever out of habit. Always encapsulated to keep things organized, and it would work perfect for my purposes except for a few occasions where the material is larger size and I would request separated - but this made things slightly difficult where I would have to manually connect the data which was a bit time consuming but worked in the end. Recently an editor I have been working with was sending me AAF's. Worked extremely well although contained a video track that would give me problems but I would just skip it on import and bring in video manually which is typical for my omf imports. the AAF's were separated but imported perfect with no manual sync no matter the project size, and also pans werent all whacky like they could be on stereo tracks with the OMFs. If i understand correct AAF is newer than OMF, even thow they are both old by todays standards? is there any reason not to request AAF from now on? I have editors I work with who always send me OMF and I have them well trained, and I fear changing to aaf for them might disrupt things if the process causes any issues on their end. 

 

[henrimic]

A big advantage for post, the AAF keep the original metadata of the sound files, so it’s easier to conform multitracks in Protools Ultimate via the field recorder workflow. 

[osa]

1 hour ago, henrimic said:

A big advantage for post, the AAF keep the original metadata of the sound files, so it’s easier to conform multitracks in Protools Ultimate via the field recorder workflow. 

Oh wow that’s mind blowing in itself considering 90% of the projects i work on w post are starting with my field audio. Cant believe i have beeb missing out 

[Rick Reineke]

AAF is good in a perfect world, but in my experience 80% of AAF imports have some kind of problem. especially when going x-app and and x-platform. OMF is much more reliable and btw, metadata can be maintained if the media files are not embedded in the OMF file, which has the inherent size limit anyway.

[henrimic]

16 minutes ago, Rick Reineke said:

btw, metadata can be maintained if the media files are not embedded in the OMF file, which has the inherent size limit anyway.

 
Good to know, I always received embedded audio files. Thx for the tip.

[osa]

Think i am gonna stay the course with current editors i work with to not mess with our workflow. Will try to run some tests with a friend of mine. If I recall correctly in all of the OMFS I have worked with encapsulated as well as separated, the only meta-data with the files is the editor timestamps and not the original timestamps of the files whether it be camera footage that was synced with production sound on set or the production sound files themselves. I have editors give me EDL’s and i use EDiLoad to sync my production sound files with these sessions. This is something I’ve never explored with AAF but going to try to do a comparison between them all when i get a chance

[D Clay Audio]

On 4/20/2023 at 12:33 PM, Rick Reineke said:

AAF is good in a perfect world, but in my experience 80% of AAF imports have some kind of problem. especially when going x-app and and x-platform. OMF is much more reliable and btw, metadata can be maintained if the media files are not embedded in the OMF file, which has the inherent size limit anyway.

 

I would echo this -- AAF's can be great until they're not. 

 

Though it's rare -- I've had issues with corrupted timelines, audio sync issues stemming from AAF's, specifically.

Issues where simply exporting another AAF could not fix the problem.

Sometimes Premiere/Resolve/Final Cut simply don't play nice with Pro Tools. 

I've asked editors to kick me out an OMF instead and the issues were instantly solved. 

 

I only need the bare minimum amount of data when ingesting audio -- filenames, audio/visual sync in timeline, etc. OMF has all of that. 

AAF's are a bit extraneous and can sometimes cause more issues than they solve. 

[Philip Perkins]

Some edit systems now only make AAFs (Avid, Resolve, X2Pro w/ FCPX), so you have to kind of live with them.  In recent times OMFs (non-embedded) seemed to work the most reliably with Premiere, but AAFs have been ok too.  As always since the beginning of exports, the quality of the result has a lot to do with the skill and housekeeping of the editor.  A good tool to have around is AATranslator, which can work with problematic exports that no DAW incl PT can open.

[Rick Reineke]

Quote

AAF's can be great until they're not. 

+11

AAF has always been problematic for me going x-app and platform.

OMF worked 90% of the time. The other 10% was pilot error (export) by the video post editor. Unfortunately most NLEs dropped the OMF export option, and convertions to OMF or other compatible format is hit and miss.

[osa]

i stayed the course with OMF separated and for me it has solved the problems I was having. So far so good only because everyone I receive from has been using premiere.

[Rick Reineke]

btw, I also use AATranslater for an occasion conversion which usually works relatively good.

[The Immoral Mr Teas]

Thanks Philip and Rick for getting me to have another look at AA Translator (Rick's post above for link). I was aware of it a long while ago but had slipped my mind in a time when my workflow didn't need such tools. These days (and for the past few years in retrospect) it looks indispensable.

 

Jez

[Philip Perkins]

If you work in any DAW other than ProTools ever AAT is an absolutely mission-critical app.