AAF Checker for Video Editors: How to Ship a Clean Handoff

AAF Checker for Video Editors: How to Ship a Clean Handoff

The AAF you export is the first input to someone else's job, not the last step of yours. A sound editor or re-recording mixer imports it into Pro Tools and builds the mix from whatever you sent. When the file is clean the handoff is invisible. When it is not, the work comes back to you days later, after you have moved on to the next cut and lost the context to fix it quickly.

The AAF Checker is a free tool that closes that gap. You run your exported AAF through it before you send, and it tells you whether the file is sound in some seconds. This guide is for the person doing the exporting: why the check belongs on your side of the handoff, what actually breaks in an AAF, and how to get the export right the first time.

Why this is the video editor's problem to catch, not the mixer's

Walk into almost any content operation and count the chairs. There are far more video editors than audio engineers. From what we've seen coming into post as newcomers, in the larger in-house teams the split runs something like 60 to 8.

That imbalance is the whole point. The audio team is a narrow resource sitting at the end of dozens of timelines, so a broken AAF does not cost one person 30 minutes. It can add 2 to 3 hours of manual rebuild on the audio side, sometimes approaching half a day on a complex project, and then it comes back to you to re-send. By the time it does, your project may be closed and your media relinked for the next job, so the fix that would have taken seconds at export now takes an hour to reconstruct.

You are the only person in the chain who can fix the file cheaply, because you are the only one with the source sequence still open. That is the case for moving the check upstream.

What "sound" means for an AAF

An AAF that imports without an error dialog is not the same as an AAF that is ready to mix. The failures that matter are the ones that pass silently in your NLE and only surface on the audio side:

• Stereo exported as dual-mono. Premiere in particular splits a stereo source into two mono files, so a stereo clip on your timeline arrives as Audio 1.L and Audio 1.R on separate mono tracks. The mixer then has to identify and rebuild every stereo pair by hand before mixing.
• Missing or wrong timecode and metadata. The audio team uses timecode to relink production sound and line the session up to picture. When it does not survive the export, recovery is slow and sometimes impossible without going back to production. We cover what does and does not survive in a guide to AAF metadata.
• No handles. If clips are exported flush to their edit points, the mixer has no room to fade, extend, or smooth a transition. A second or two of handle on each clip is the difference between a workable session and a locked one.
• Tracks with no naming logic. When everything arrives as Audio 1 through 24 with mixed content, the audio professional has to listen through the entire timeline just to work out what they were sent.

None of these throw a warning when you export, which is exactly why a check before sending is worth 30 seconds.

Get the export right before the checker even runs

The checker catches problems, but the cheaper move is not creating them. A short pre-send routine removes most of the failures above:

• Name and organise your audio tracks before export, so dialogue, music, and effects are not scattered across generically numbered tracks.
• Add handles of at least a second or two, so the mix has room to work.
• Be deliberate about stereo. Know how your NLE treats stereo on AAF export and tell the audio team what to expect. Premiere's dual-mono behavior is the most common surprise, and the same export from Avid or DaVinci Resolve behaves differently again.
• Keep timecode and frame rate consistent with the picture you are delivering against, and confirm the sequence start timecode is set.

The exact settings depend on your NLE. We have step-by-step export guides for Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, and the same export discipline applies in Avid Media Composer.

How to run the check

The check sits between export and send. Export the AAF as you normally would, run it through the AAF Checker, and read the result before you hand anything off. If it flags a problem you still have the sequence open, so you can adjust a setting and re-export in the same sitting, rather than hearing about it in a message three days later.

Where Forte AI fits

Forte AI built the AAF Checker from the audio side. Our main product, fPost, takes the raw AAF a video editor sends and rebuilds it into a session a mixer can work in, so we spend our days looking at exactly what makes an AAF fail on import. The checker puts that same import-side view in front of the person who exports. You see the file the way the audio team will see it, while you can still do something about it.

If you hand off AAFs, the smallest useful change you can make this week is a 30-second check between export and send. The AAF Checker is free to download here. Run it on the next file you send, and let the audio team open a session instead of a problem.

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