What to do when the timeline from an AAF file won’t play in Adobe Premiere

I don’t know how many people will be in the exact situation as me, but I imagine there may be others…

If you’ve followed my blog on my feature film site, www.AmnesiaTheMovie.com, you know that I’ve moved away from Adobe Premiere, in favor of EditShare’s Lightworks, mostly because it’s just an amazing workflow, and I love how things work there, but also due to cost, and Adobe’s change of licensing.

At any rate, I just achieved picture lock on the trailer for the feature, and wanted to color correct and grade it in DaVinci Resolve Lite 10 Beta 3. So, I exported an .AAF file from Lightworks in Avid 1080p/23.976fps format and tried to import it.

Long story short, Resolve doesn’t seem to like Raw footage shot on a Sony F3, and the .AAF file kept giving me errors on importing, so I finally threw my hands up, and brought it into Adobe Premiere CS6 instead.

After having to find each and every clip using the Windows Search feature and copying the path into Premiere, I finally had a timeline with everything on it, except…

The footage aspect ratio was wonly, and to boot, it stayed on Pending forever. No amount of closing and opening Premiere, or waiting fixed the issue. And, when I looked on the timeline, I could see the footage was there… I could see the thumbnails.

So, after some back and forth, I copied all the footage from the Sequence that the AAF file had created, created a new sequence with the correct settings for my DVCPROHD footage, and pasted it all in… and it worked!!!

I still had problems on a couple of clips in which the video was out of sync with the audio, but I was able to fix that and get to grading, using Magic Bullet Mojo and Magic Bullet Looks for a quick grade.

I posted my problem in the Lightworks and Resolve forums, but haven’t found a solution yet. There are some good suggestions on both, though, if you want to read them.

At any rate, hope this is of some use.

Val Gameiro
Writer, Director, Filmmaker
Austin, Texas