Getting Final Cut Pro audio into Pro Tools

What this is

fcp2aaf turns a Final Cut Pro timeline into an AAF that Pro Tools opens as an audio session: every clip in its place, with its level, its fades and its markers. The output is standard AAF, so Nuendo, Cubase, Fairlight, Resolve and Media Composer open the same file from their own import menu — each of them in its own way, which has a section of its own further down.

Final Cut does not export AAF. It exports FCPXML, a document describing the edit, and that document is what gets read here to write the AAF and to cut from your original material exactly the pieces that are heard in the edit.

It is built for the turnover from picture to sound on film and series: the AAF is the file the sound department opens to begin. Where it sits in post has a page of its own.

It is a native Mac application. It needs a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer) running macOS 14 or later.

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Where all of this happens

On your machine. The conversion is a process running on your own Mac, reading your own disk: neither the FCPXML nor your material is sent anywhere.

Your material is only ever read. Nothing is written over it, nothing is moved, and nothing is copied except the audio that goes into the delivery — into the folder you choose, at the end.

Before you start: exporting from Final Cut

In Final Cut Pro, select the project in the sidebar and use File ▸ Export XML. Save it wherever you like; the FCPXML version does not matter, every one Final Cut writes today is read here.

If you would rather see it than read it, there is a step-by-step guide with the screens — this export, the conversion, and the Pro Tools import panel, in three steps. This page is the long version of the same route.

The format is backward-compatible, so an older export is read as readily as a current one. FCPXML 1.12, 1.13 and 1.14 — the versions Final Cut Pro has written since 10.8 — are each tested against directly.

Final Cut can give you two things: a loose .fcpxml file, or a .fcpxmld package, which is a folder underneath. Both work, and both can be opened from the Finder, dropped on the window, or picked with File ▸ Open Timeline….

You do not need to consolidate or copy anything. What matters is that the original files are still on your disk.

Step 1 · Timeline

Drop the .fcpxml or the .fcpxmld on the window, or use Open Timeline… (⌘O).

Or from the Finder: right-click the Final Cut XML, Open With, fcp2aaf. The double click stays with Final Cut, whose file it is; fcp2aaf only offers itself in the menu. It works on a Mac that has never had Final Cut installed, which is usually the one receiving the delivery.

A folder can be dropped as well: if it holds a single timeline, that is the one that opens, and if it holds several you are asked for the document itself rather than the folder.

If the document holds several projects, a menu appears at the left of the toolbar and you pick the one you are converting — it is there only when there is something to choose. A document exported from a whole event or library often holds more than you remember putting in it.

Step 2 · The material

There is nothing to do here, and that is the point of it. Final Cut writes the full path of every file into the FCPXML, and those paths are read straight off your disk — so if your material is where it was when you exported, it is already found. Nothing to point at, nothing to relink, and nothing to consolidate or copy first.

A Final Cut library is read the same way. Material you imported into the library lives inside the .fcpbundle, the path leads inside it, and it is found there without unpacking anything or exporting it out.

Nothing is copied and nothing is moved. The pieces that are needed are read, and that is all.

When the material has moved, you are told before anything is decoded, in a single row above the timeline: how many of the files the document points at are not on the disk, and the two things you can do about it.

This is the ordinary case when a project changes drive between the edit and the mix. The FCPXML holds the full path of every file, so a drive with a different name breaks all of them at once — and the paths that are missing are the ones the editor’s Mac had, not yours.

And it does not stop the conversion. Those clips are left out of the AAF, everything else is delivered as usual, and the report names them file by file so whoever opens the session knows what is missing and why. A track left with no clips at all does not travel either: an empty track in Pro Tools is a name with nothing under it, which is another way of saying the material was delivered silent.

Clips with no file are drawn hollow, with a dashed edge and the word OFFLINE, and with no waveform, because there is none to draw: nothing was decoded and nothing can be. They deliberately do not look like a silenced clip, though both mean “you will not hear this”: a silenced one is in the session at −∞ and you can raise it, and this one is not in the file.

Clicking them plays nothing, and raises no error: there is no file to play from. Point at one and the card says so, naming the recording it is missing.

The figures at the top keep the count. Clips starts saying how many travel out of how many the timeline has — 5/8 — and only when the two numbers differ, so an ordinary conversion still shows a single figure. At the foot of the window, beside the version, you are told if a whole track is being left out, in a different sentence from the one for tracks you excluded yourself: telling you that you excluded a track you never touched would be the window lying about your own session.

Before it converts you are asked, with the count of the clips that will be left out, and you can cancel and go looking for the material first. It is the only question this window asks before a conversion, and it appears only when something really is being left behind: a warning that appears every time is a warning people learn to dismiss unread.

If there is nothing at all to deliver, because the drive is not mounted or the document arrived from another machine, then it does refuse — at once, with no question and without asking you for a folder. An AAF with not one clip in it is an empty delivery handed over as a success, in a session that merely looks empty. No folder is created and nothing is written.

“Save the list…” writes every missing file to a text file, grouped by the folder each one came from. It is for the case where you opened the XML on a machine that is not the one it was cut on: you do not have the material and you have nothing to look for, and what you need is not a folder to show but a list to send the editor to ask for the files. It opens with what to ask them for: send it with its folders, send each drive or card separately, and rename nothing.

That last part is not politeness. Relinking is a folder substitution at the front of a path, so the structure is what it works from; and a camera starts every card at MVI_0001, so gathering two cards into one folder makes two different clips read the same file. That is why the list comes out grouped: it shows the structure rather than describing it.

Press “Relink…” and show it the folder the material is in now. You do not have to work out which part of the path changed: pick the drive, or pick the folder the rushes are in, and either one is understood. Whatever you choose, it is compared against what the document asked for and the difference is worked out from your own disk.

The count comes back straight away, so you know it was the right folder before you convert rather than after. If the material is spread across two drives, show it one and then the other — the warning stays until nothing is missing, and each folder you show is remembered. Clips that were OFFLINE become ordinary clips again and their waveforms draw themselves.

If the material arrives loose in one folder, without the folders the editor had, it still relinks — but it takes one go for each folder it came from. The rule replaces a folder at the front of a path, so you show the same folder, the count drops, you show it again, and it drops again, until nothing is missing. With the folders kept it is a single gesture, and it does not matter how deep you point: the whole drive, the project folder or the rushes folder are all understood.

And there is one case where gathering material into a folder loses something that cannot be recovered. A camera starts every card at MVI_0001, so two cards hold files of the same name, and one folder can only keep one of them. When that happens, two different paths from the document end up reading the same file, and one of those clips carries the wrong recording. The window says so before you convert, naming the file and both paths, and the report repeats it. It is the only thing on this page that means the delivery may be wrong: ask for the material with its folders and relink again.

Once it is found, the window says where it is reading from instead, and the delivery report writes it down: which folder was swapped for which, and how many files came from it. The mixer opening your AAF can therefore see that the material was read from somewhere other than the document said.

Step 3 · What I found

This is where you check that what was read is your project. If these numbers do not look like your timeline, something went wrong in the export, and it is better seen here than in Pro Tools.

• Clips — how many pieces of audio are in the edit. A stereo clip counts once. If any material is not on disk it shows two numbers — 5/8 — the clips that will reach the AAF, out of the ones the timeline has.
• FCP tracks — how many tracks the edit needs. Not the same as your roles: if two clips of the same role overlap, two tracks are needed.
• AAF slots — how many tracks Pro Tools will actually open, which is the figure to look at. A mono track is one slot and a stereo pair is two, so thirteen tracks in the edit can be twenty-six in the session.
• Markers — how many will travel into the AAF. In Pro Tools they arrive as memory locations.
• Fades — how many clips carry a fade in or out.
• Regions — how many pieces of audio have to be cut from the material. It is the unit the conversion's progress is measured in.
• Starts at and Ends at — the timecode the session will open at, and the one the last clip runs out at. Both are counted on the project's own timecode clock, so they are the two numbers your DAW will agree with to the frame.

The project's frame rate, whether its timecode is NDF (non-drop) or DF (drop frame), and the rate the session will be at are in the window's subtitle, under the project's name. The first two change how times are numbered, never where the audio sounds.

If the document points at material that is not on the disk, it is said here as well, before anything is decoded — and the conversion is still possible without it: see Step 2.

Everything that will not travel can be read before you convert. When there is something to say, Notes appears beside the Convert button with the count: a channel the file does not have, an angle with no audio, an audition that resolved, a file that is not there. It is the same list the report carries at the end, with the clip and the moment it sits at, put where it can still change what you decide. It is not an error: it is what you will have to handle by hand, and it travels in the delivery's report so the mixer has it too.

Step 4 · Settings

The defaults are the ones that suit an ordinary delivery. Change them only when you know why. The column stands beside the timeline the whole time, it is not a step you pass through, and it is six groups of settings, with a list at the foot of what it handles, taken here in the order it presents them.

At the head of the column is the preset: everything below it, saved under a name and sent to somebody else. If the mixer sent you one, load it there and the whole column is set the way they asked. See Presets.

How it travels to the AAF. The first group, and the one the others depend on.

• Audio — Inside the AAF is one self-contained file, the simplest thing to hand over: there is nothing beside it that can get separated from it in a shared folder or on the way through a mail server. Beside the AAF is a small AAF pointing at WAVs next to it, lighter to write and what a mixer wants when the delivery is going onto a drive — hand over the whole folder. Each one says under it what metadata it carries: inside, the timecode, the scene, the take and the sound roll; beside, all of that inside every WAV, the recordist's note too, and for audio from a field recorder everything else the recorder wrote, such as the shoot date and the UBITS. The table is in Opening it in Pro Tools.
• Metadata priority — where Final Cut and a field recorder's own file state the scene, the take, the roll, the note, a channel's name or the start timecode differently, which of the two the delivery uses. Final Cut, the default, keeps what the editor may have corrected; Audio file keeps what the recorder wrote on the day. A field only one of them states always travels, and the report names every difference with both values. With the audio inside the AAF only the scene, the take, the roll and the timecode are decided, because nothing else of the recorder's travels there.
• Channels — One per track, the default, puts every channel on its own track (.L, .R, .1, .2…), which is standard AAF and opens anywhere. Grouped in stereo puts a stereo pair on a single track, handier in Pro Tools but using an operation that is not in the standard. Anything wider than a pair still arrives one channel per track, and the report names each recording that arrived that way.
• How fades travel — four places a fade can live in an AAF, and they are not interchangeable. They are worth a list of their own, below.

The four fade modes:

• Clip fades — recommended. They reach Pro Tools as real, draggable clip fades.
• Volume automation — ramps in the volume curve. Sounds the same, but they are not draggable fades, and it spends the automation lane on shapes that are really clip fades.
• Do not write them — the clip stays at its steady level, and you get the list to redraw them.
• Native AAF — what the standard says, and what Pro Tools ignores. For other programs only.

The session. What the AAF declares about itself.

• Start timecode — where the session begins. Untouched it is the project's own, and the row says so; type one and yours is used instead. It is a real timecode field: digits only, arriving from the right as they do in Pro Tools, and you can double-click one section to change just the minutes or just the frames. Type 75 seconds and it becomes a minute and fifteen. Once you have changed it, Use the timecode the project carries appears under the row and is the way back.
• Sample rate — “Automatic” conforms to the rate your material already has, and says which rate that is. It is the best answer, because a conversion that never runs cannot colour anything. Choose 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4 or 192 kHz only when the session has to be at that rate. If waveforms have already been drawn, changing the rate asks first, because those pictures have to be made again at the new rate; if the window already has them for that rate, it does not ask.
• Bit depth — 24-bit by default, and 16 is there either way. 32-bit needs the audio beside the AAF, because an AAF cannot carry a four-byte sample inside itself; while the audio is set to go inside, the row says so and 32 is not in the list at all.

Handles. How much of each original travels around the piece that is actually heard.

• Whole files — every source end to end instead of just the clips. The AAF weighs far more; it makes sense when the mixer wants the complete takes.
• Handles — extra seconds kept either side of every clip, in seconds, so it can be stretched in the mix. They cost disk space, and they are the thing a mixer discovers they needed once they are already at the session. With whole files on, the field is disabled and says it is having no effect.

What to include. All four are on: leaving something out of a delivery should have to be asked for, never assumed.

• Carry pan — each clip's left/right position. A surround panner has no single left/right position, so it is reported rather than guessed at.
• Carry clip gain — the level you set on each clip.
• Carry volume automation — the keyframed curve, where a clip has one. Clip fades are unaffected: they have their own setting above.
• Merge the subroles — on. Subroles are how an editor keeps one microphone apart from the next; with this the ones under a role share a track wherever they fit, and the track is named after its role. Turn it off and each subrole gets its own again, contiguous and named after the microphone, which is how a synced shoot with eight of them opens as eight tracks.

Merging is a request, not a promise. Two rules still split a track and neither is a matter of taste: clips that overlap cannot share one, and a track carries a single channel width, because Pro Tools asserts inside its AAF importer when a track's clips disagree about that. So eight subroles become one track on a sparse edit and three on a dense one — and the track list shows you which the moment you move the switch, so there is nothing to guess.

A merged track is named after its role. With eight microphones in it, naming it after one of them would be a claim about the other seven. A subrole that ended up alone — because it overlapped, or because it was the only one — keeps its own name. And the report says how many subroles were folded onto how many tracks, because merging discards something the editor put there: which microphone a clip came from is not recoverable from the file afterwards.

Markers. Final Cut has three kinds and they are three different intentions, so each has its own switch. They travel on their frame, and in Pro Tools they arrive as memory locations. Switch one off and the rail above the tracks empties of that kind too, so the window shows what the delivery will have.

• Carry markers — the plain ones. Notes for whoever gets the timeline, and what a mixer navigates by.
• Carry to-dos — work still owed. Ticked or not, both travel: done and pending are the same note to a mixer, one of them already handled.
• Carry chapter markers — where the programme breaks for delivery. Useful to a picture editor, rarely to a mix.

Each one says what it is. A to-do arrives as [TODO], a completed one as [DONE], a chapter as [CHAPTER], in front of the words you wrote; a plain marker travels untouched. The tag is in the text because that is the only part Pro Tools reads: we tried the colour and one marker ruler per kind first, and it takes neither. Another DAW may show the same markers somewhere of its own, or not at all — see Opening it in other DAWs.

The whole list, in one window. View all at the right of the marker rail — or ⇧⌘M — opens every marker in the timeline down a column: its timecode, its name and its kind. A rail can only draw one flag where several markers share an instant; this is where you read them. The timecode is the session's own counter, so it moves with the start timecode you set.

And you can leave one out. Untick a marker in that list and it does not travel — not into the AAF, not into the files beside it. It stays in the list, dimmed, and stays on the rail drawn faintly, because deciding what to leave out means seeing what you are leaving out. The count reads 6/7 wherever it appears: delivered over what the timeline has, and only when the two differ.

A marker whose kind is switched off above cannot be ticked back on here, and its tick is shown unavailable rather than missing. The three switches decide what the delivery carries; this list narrows what is left. They are also what a preset carries — an individual tick is a position in this project's markers and would mean something else in the next one, so it is forgotten when you open another timeline.

Marker files. Two more switches, both off unless you ask, that write the same list as files beside the AAF. They change nothing about the AAF, which carries its markers either way; they exist because not every program reads markers out of one.

• Pro Tools and DaVinci Resolve read them from the AAF. Neither file is needed.
• Nuendo reads neither from an AAF, and imports either file.
• Cubase reads neither from an AAF, and imports only the MIDI — the CSV import is a Nuendo feature Cubase does not have.
• Premiere Pro takes neither the AAF's markers nor either file. There is nothing that gets markers into Premiere this way.

That list is measured rather than assumed. Nuendo does not write markers into an AAF of its own either: a session with three of them exported and searched for their names, in every encoding, came back with none — so there is no shape we could send that Nuendo would read. Steinberg's own documentation lists the ways markers can be imported and an AAF is not among them.

The CSV, in Nuendo. Open the markers window with ⌘M, then its Functions menu, and choose the CSV import. In the first dialog leave Autodetect and Comma. In the second, three things matter: set Ignore First Rows to 1 or the header arrives as a marker; assign column 2 to Timecode In, which is the one it cannot do without; and assign the marker's text to Description — there is no attribute called Name, and Comment is stored without being drawn. Column 3 is the name on its own and column 4 the same words with [TODO] or [CHAPTER] in front, so map whichever of the two you want to read on the track.

The MIDI, in Nuendo and Cubase. Turn on Preferences ▸ MIDI ▸ MIDI File ▸ Import Markers first, or the file arrives and no markers do. Import it at the start of the session: the positions run from there, not from timecode zero. Leave the project tempo at its default 120 — neither program reads the tempo written in a MIDI file, so the markers are written for the one it already has. Written for 60, which is the reading anybody would choose, every marker landed at exactly half its time in both.

Several markers can land on the same frame. Mark at one point in the timeline on three different lanes and Final Cut writes three markers at the identical time, and all three travel. A horizontal ruler can only draw one flag there: Pro Tools’ own ruler shows the last of the pile, and the rail in the fcp2aaf window shows the first with the count of the others beside it. The full list is in Pro Tools’ Memory Locations window, ⌘5, which is where a session’s markers are read whenever more than one shares an instant.

Silenced in Final Cut. Final Cut goes quiet for three quite different reasons, and each gets its own switch. Muting three microphones to hear the lavalier is you choosing what to listen to while you cut; switching a clip off is you saying it does not go; and pulling the fader to the bottom is silencing it without taking it out of the edit. None of the three is a decision about the mix, which is why none of them is answered by another one's control.

• Carry every microphone of a synced clip — on. If three microphones were muted to leave only the lavalier, the boom and the rest still reach the AAF, each on the track that microphone would have had anyway, with its clip gain at −∞. Pro Tools shows that on the face of the clip, nothing is audible, and the whole recording is there the moment the mixer raises it. It applies to multitrack, synchronized, multicam and compound clips alike. Turn it off when you want a smaller delivery. In a multicam, the angles that clip declares are the ones that travel: those you left sounding and those you switched off after switching them on. An angle you never switched on there is not in the XML Final Cut exports.
• Carry switched-off clips — on. The clips you switched off in Final Cut, wherever they sit. They travel after the programme, on their own tracks marked (OFF), with their clip gain at −∞ as well. Left out, every one of them is named in the report.
• Carry the clips the editor faded to −∞ — on. Final Cut's volume slider stops at −96 dB and its inspector writes −∞ there, so a clip in that position is a mute rather than a level somebody chose. It is the ordinary shape of a double-system shoot: the camera's own audio faded to the bottom under every take, the recorder's kept. They travel on their usual track, among clips that play, at −∞ clip gain. Turn it off and they do not travel, and the report says how many.
• With all three off there is not one silent clip left in the delivery, with one exception: a silenced clip that is half of a dissolve stays. Final Cut writes the transition as its own element straddling the cut, so removing one side leaves a transition with nothing to dissolve from, and Pro Tools refuses that file without saying why. The report names them, so nobody wonders why a few survived.
• Anything that arrives silent arrives at −∞ rather than at a number, which is the same thing Final Cut's own inspector shows. A figure on a clip leaves the mixer deciding whether somebody chose that level; −∞ can only mean off. Nothing is destroyed either way — the recording comes back whole the moment the gain is raised.

Works with. The foot of the column names the kinds of clip this handles. There is nothing to turn off here: how each of them is treated follows the switches directly above.

• Compound clips and containers — they are opened, and what is inside is converted like any other clip.
• Sync clips and multicam — every angle with audio is heard, not only the one on screen.
• Multitrack recorders — each microphone on its own track, in the recorder's own order.
• Clips with a speed change — the audio is delivered at its original timing, unstretched, so you can retime it with the session's own tools. If the clip is sped up, its audio stops where the clip ends, and what would play past that travels as handle. The same holds when the speed change is on a multicam, a compound or a synchronized clip.
• Material at another frame rate — a different thing, and it goes the other way. A clip shot at 25 or 60 fps and cut into a timeline at another rate is scaled by Final Cut so it lands frame for frame on the picture, audio included. That one is resampled, by the exact ratio, because there what the mixer wants is the audio under the picture. The report says which clips it did that to.

AAF limitations. The last group in the column is not a set of controls: it is what the format itself cannot carry, whoever writes it. Every line was established by writing an AAF and opening it in Pro Tools, and it is here so that nobody spends an afternoon looking for a switch that was never going to exist.

• Track and clip colour — an AAF carries no colour. Pro Tools gives every track its own when it imports the session. Four tracks written with the same colour, in every place the format offers, arrived in Pro Tools' own defaults.
• One marker ruler, one colour — Pro Tools has had several marker rulers since 2022.9, and an AAF has no way to name them. Sent as one ruler per kind, everything landed in the first; sent with a colour each, everything arrived the same colour. Which is why the kind travels in the marker's text.
• The shape of a curved fade — easeIn, easeOut and easeInOut arrive as straight fades. That is what Pro Tools accepts as a real, draggable fade, and the report names each one, with its clip and its timecode, so you can give it its shape back in one gesture.
• Pan on a track grouped in stereo — not read on a grouped track, whatever is written. One channel per track keeps the pan, and the app says so on screen the moment you group.
• A muted clip — the format has no mute a session reads back, so anything silenced arrives with its clip gain at −∞ instead. Nothing is lost: it is one gesture from being heard.
• Final Cut's audio effects — an EQ or a compressor added in Final Cut is a Final Cut plugin, and nothing in the format carries it into somebody else's session. The audio arrives as it was recorded, at its clip gain.

Step 5 · The tracks, and listening to them

This is the session you are about to make, drawn. Each row is a track, and it reads across: the box that decides whether it travels, the names Pro Tools will list for it — a stereo pair is A1.L over A1.R, on two lines, so there is nothing left to work out between this list and the session that opens from it — the microphone it comes from with how many clips it carries, and then the track itself with its clips drawn where they fall.

The lane is the session. Every clip sits where it sounds, in the colour of its role, with its fades darkening the corners it fades over and a cross where two clips dissolve into each other. Anything arriving silenced is hatched in grey and says MUTE. None of it is an approximation: the positions come from the same arithmetic that writes the AAF, so a boundary in the window and a boundary in the file are the same boundary.

And a clip whose file is not there is drawn hollow, with a dashed edge and the word OFFLINE, with no waveform and with nothing to hear when you click it. It is not the same as a silenced clip and so it does not look like one: the silenced one is in the session and you can raise it, and this one is not in the file. Its slot column reads OFF rather than a track number, because there is no Pro Tools track to name. It is counted in Step 2.

A clip arrives silent by two roads, and both are drawn the same. Either you switched a microphone off inside a synced clip, or you pulled that clip's own fader to the bottom. Final Cut writes each one differently, but in Pro Tools both open at −∞ clip gain, so both are hatched here. It is the ordinary shape of a double-system shoot: the camera's own audio faded to the bottom under every take, the recorder's kept.

A split edit stays split. Where the sound of one shot runs on under the next, or starts before it — an L-cut or a J-cut — the audio lands exactly where it played. An AAF carries where each sound falls and nothing about where the picture was cut, so the join travels on its own: nothing has to be done to keep it, and where the two sounds overlap they arrive on separate tracks, as any two overlapping clips of a role do.

Moving around it. The view opens showing five minutes — a project shorter than that fits whole, and there is nothing to scroll. From there:

• R and T zoom out and in, as in Pro Tools, on the point under the pointer. The two buttons at the bottom left do the same, and beside them All fits the whole project and 5 min comes back.
• The navigator, the strip under the tracks, is the whole project compressed to one line per track. The rectangle on it is what you are looking at: drag it to jump anywhere.
• Markers have a rail of their own above the tracks, in the colour of their kind, and passing over one draws its line down the whole session. Where several fall on the same frame the flag doubles and the count sits beside the name — +2 — and pointing at it lists every one of them with its kind.
• The role legend, at the foot of the lanes, says which colour is which role. There are twelve colours; a project can have more roles than that, and the count of the ones left without one sits at the end — +6 — and pointing at it lists them by name.

Point at a clip and a card names the recording it came from, which channels of it this track draws (3–4 of 4, when a four-microphone rush is involved), where it sits in the session, the timecode it was struck at, its clip gain and its fades. That is what tells apart five tracks called the same thing that came off five different machines.

Click a clip and it plays. From the head of the clip, so you hear how it comes in, and it plays the exact channel that is going to travel: on a four-microphone recorder, the third microphone is the third and not the first. It is decoded the same way the conversion decodes it, so what you are listening to is the region the AAF will carry rather than an approximation of it.

• Hold instead of clicking, and it plays for as long as you hold.
• Drag across the clip and it is a real scrub: the sound follows your hand at the speed it moves, forwards and backwards, and winds down to silence when the hand stops. Let go and the clip carries on from there.
• The space bar, or the pause button at the foot of the window, holds it where it is and lets it go again, so you can stop on a word, look at the lane and carry on.
• Without the mouse: with a row selected, Return plays its clip and the arrows move to the next and the previous one. A whole track can be walked with the keyboard, and it works with VoiceOver.
• Escape, or the stop button at the foot of the window, ends it. While something sounds the transport takes that spot — where the playhead is, which recording it is, and why it arrives silent when it does — in the place the version sits the rest of the time.

Everything plays at the level it was recorded at, and the level the session will open at is said beside it rather than applied. That is what answers the question you clicked to ask: whether the boom is clean, where the plane goes over, which of two takes this is. A clip the editor left at −24 dB is a decision about a mix that does not exist yet, and hearing it at that level answers nothing.

Silenced material plays too, at the level it was recorded at, with a notice saying it reaches the AAF at −∞. Playing it silent would not have answered the question you clicked it to ask, which is what you are about to send muted. That holds for both roads to silence: a microphone you switched off and a clip whose fader you left at the bottom both sound, under a notice saying which of the two it is.

The waveforms: the “Generate Waveforms” button. An FCPXML carries the cuts, the levels and a path to each recording, and not one sample of audio. So where each voice sits inside a clip, and how loud it is, the document cannot say: the audio has to be decoded to know. That button, beside Convert, is what does it.

And that decoding is not thrown away. It is exactly what the delivery needs, kept under the same names the conversion will look for, so once the waveforms are drawn, converting takes seconds. It is the same work done once, at the moment you choose. That is why it is a button and not a switch: doing it as each document opened would make you wait before you had decided anything, and the settings you had not chosen yet would have changed what needs decoding.

While it runs the window dims and a panel says the stage, the count and the name of the recording being worked on. The button that stops it is in that panel. Whatever was decoded stays done, so stopping costs nothing but what was left.

The picture survives a settings change. Moving the handles, changing the bit depth or switching to whole files does not cost you the waveforms: the shape of a clip does not depend on material kept either side of it. What does change the picture is the sample rate, because it moves where a second falls: there it asks first, and the button stays within reach to draw them again, including after a conversion. That is the case of two deliveries at different rates. And two projects cut from the same recordings share what has been drawn, so the second one opens with its waveforms already there.

If you would rather not press the button each time, Settings ▸ Interface can generate them as a timeline opens. Opening takes longer, but you reach Convert with everything done.

• Reorder — drag a row up or down by its name. This list's order is the track order in the session, and Back to the original order, under the list, puts it back if you lose the thread.
• Rename — double-click the name and type. Return keeps it, and so does leaving the field: a click anywhere else keeps what you typed. Escape is what discards, and an empty name goes back to the one the converter chose. It replaces the role; the track number and the .L/.R suffix stay, because they are how Pro Tools knows two tracks are a pair. It is in the right-click menu as well.
• Leave out — untick the box, or use the right-click menu. That track does not travel, its lane greys out, and its audio is not even read, so the conversion is quicker too. At least one has to remain, and anything you leave out can be put back at any time.

Beside each name is how many clips the track carries, and a badge when any of them arrive silent: MUTE · −∞ when the whole track does, 5 at −∞ when some of them do, and (OFF) for a track of material that was switched off in Final Cut and that you asked to bring. Those last ones sit after the programme, past a dashed line in the lanes, and arrive with their clip gain at −∞, so nothing plays until you raise it.

How many tracks the edit laid out, and how many audio slots those become, is up in the figures along the top. A mono track is one slot; an ungrouped pair is two.

Step 6 · Converting, and the delivery

If clips are going to be left out because their material is not on disk, you are told before anything else, with the count, and you can cancel and go looking for it first. It comes before you are asked for the folder on purpose: finding out what is missing after you have named a delivery is finding out late. And if there is nothing to deliver at all, that is said there too and no folder is created. Both warnings are in Step 2.

Before anything starts you are asked where the delivery should go. The panel opens on your Desktop the first time and afterwards wherever you last delivered, with a folder name suggested for you — the project's, or the first of name-2, name-3 that is free where you are saving.

That folder has to be one that does not exist yet, and if you name one that does, you are told so there and then. It is not fussiness: everything a conversion writes goes inside that folder, and a folder made empty a moment ago has nothing in it to write over — so “it will not overwrite your material” stops being a rule that has to hold and becomes a situation that cannot arise. The cost is deliberate: a conversion that failed leaves its folder behind, so trying again needs a new name or the old folder moved.

Each piece of audio is read, conformed and written as soon as it is ready. Nothing piles up in memory, so it does not matter that the delivery runs to gigabytes. Regions that repeat are decoded once and reused, and the report says how many were.

Anything you listened to in the track list was decoded the same way, so it is already done before the conversion starts. And if you generated the waveforms, there is nothing left to decode: the conversion only writes.

That decoding is kept between conversions too. Convert the same project again, whether that is a new version, a setting changed or a track put back, and only what is new has to be decoded; the rest is already on disk. Where it is kept, and how long it stays, is The cache further down.

While it runs the window dims and all the progress is in one panel: the bar, the stage, the region count and the name of the recording being worked on. It is the same panel the waveforms use, because it is the same work.

You can stop it at any time, with the button in that panel or ⌘. What was decoded stays in the cache, and deliberately: it is exactly what a second attempt would otherwise redo. The app says how far it got. If it managed to write anything into the delivery folder it shows you the folder, so you can delete it or leave it; if you stopped it before that, the folder takes itself back and you can convert again under the same name.

When it finishes, or when you stop one, the window offers Convert again (⌘R), so a second version is not a reason to open the document a second time. Change the handles, put a track back, switch to whole files, and hand over another delivery: one cut tight for the mixer, one with whole files for the sound designer. Nothing is replaced, because the new delivery is a new folder like any other, and what has already been decoded is reused rather than decoded again.

Every delivery is that folder, and what is inside it depends on where you sent the audio:

• The AAF and its report, when the audio went inside the AAF. That file is self-contained, so hand over the AAF on its own or the whole folder, whichever suits you.
• The AAF, the audio it points at, and the report, when the audio went beside it. The AAF's name starts with 00_ so it always sorts above the WAVs. Hand over all of it: on its own, that AAF opens a session with every region offline.

What it did is on screen the moment it finishes: Report, in the bar at the bottom, in whatever language the app is set to. At the top it says whether everything arrived, or how many clips did not arrive whole. It opens with what is not in the delivery: files that would not decode, files that are not on the disk, a channel or a stretch that could not be carried, and anything in the document that could not be read. Next comes what was repaired so it could arrive, which is worth checking, and after that what was not converted, the fades you asked not to be written, what arrived approximately, what is delivered that way on purpose, and the notes. When a recording's own metadata could not travel whole, because the file was damaged or a text was too long for the AAF, it says so in a section of its own, under a heading that says the audio is complete.

Every line says which clip, at what timecode, which file with its path, and what to do to fix it: relink, replace a copy, correct a value in the document, or redraw a fade. Whatever repeats is gathered under a heading with its count, which opens with a click, and where something was left out by a switch, the section names the switch that would bring it. Every position is a timecode of the session, on the same clock as the Pro Tools counter, rather than a number of seconds from the start.

The copy that travels is the text file beside the AAF, and that one is in English on purpose: it goes out with the delivery, and whoever opens it did not choose the language the editor happened to be working in. It says what the window says, in the same order, and it prints the long lists in full at the end, under Reference, for when you are after one clip in particular.

Presets: your settings, as a file you can send

Everything in the settings column can be saved under a name, exported as one small file, and opened on somebody else's Mac. The control is at the head of the column: it names the preset in use, or says the settings are custom, and its menu holds save, set as default, rename, delete, import and export. The File menu carries the same commands.

Who this is really for. The two people in a delivery are usually not the same person. The mixer, the sound designer or the post house knows exactly how they want the session — 24 bit, five seconds of handles, the audio beside the AAF, every microphone of a synced clip — and the editor is the one sitting in front of Final Cut with the export. The editor often has no reason to know how that studio likes to work, and no way to check. Until now that spec travelled as a paragraph in an email, and arrived as a delivery that was nearly right.

A preset is the same paragraph, executable. Sound sets it up once and sends one file; the editor loads it and delivers exactly what was asked for, without having to understand any of it.

What a preset carries, and what it deliberately does not. It carries the settings column: handles and whole files, sample rate and bit depth, where the audio goes, how fades travel, one channel per track or grouped, and everything under What to include, Markers and Silenced in Final Cut.

• The start timecode does not travel. It describes the project, not the delivery. Final Cut already wrote it into the sequence, and a preset carrying 01:00:00:00 would stamp that hour onto every session afterwards.
• The track plan does not travel. Renaming and excluding tracks are decisions about this edit: the same number is a different track in the next project.
• Where your material is does not travel. A relink is a pair of absolute paths on the Mac that made it.
• Which preset is the default one does not travel either. That is a decision about your installation rather than about the delivery: the preset somebody sent you arrives as one more in the list, and marking it is yours.

So loading a preset never disturbs those three. Nor does the way back: Restore default settings, at the top of the same menu, puts back what a preset carries and leaves your timecode, your relink and your track plan exactly where they are. If you marked a preset as the default, that is what it puts back; otherwise the built-in settings.

One of your presets can be the default one. With the one you always use loaded, Set as Default in that same menu marks it: it goes to the top of the list with a pin, the app opens with those settings, and Restore default settings gives it back. There can only be one, so marking another unmarks the first. And if you delete it from the presets folder, the app opens with the built-in settings again, with nothing to undo.

Modified is not left to guesswork. Move any control after loading a preset and the head of the column says so at once. It matters because the delivery's report names the preset it was made with — and only while the settings are still that preset. A report saying “Feature mix” over a delivery whose handles were changed afterwards is paperwork worse than none, since the mixer reading it has no way to tell.

The library is a folder. One file per preset, in Application Support, which is why exporting is nearly free: the file in your library and the file you email are the same bytes. A studio can point a shared folder at that directory and have their presets appear on every Mac. Show Presets in Finder, in the same menu, opens it; drop a preset somebody sent you in there and it is in the list the next time the app comes to the front.

A name already in your library is never taken silently. Saving over one asks first, and an import that has to rename says so, because “the preset I sent you” is a thing two people compare over the phone a week later.

Opening it in Pro Tools

In Pro Tools: File ▸ Import ▸ Session Data, and choose the AAF — the one starting with 00_, when the audio was delivered beside it. In the dialog that follows, import the audio tracks as new tracks. There is a picture of that dialog, and of the two ways into it, in the step-by-step guide.

If you choose to copy the audio into the session, Pro Tools takes the files in and the delivery is no longer needed afterwards. If you choose to reference it, do not move the folder.

Every region carries the original timecode the recorder stamped on it, whether the audio went inside the AAF or beside it. That is what Spot to original time stamp uses to send a clip back to where the take was struck, and what Pro Tools matches on when you ask it for the other microphones of that take. Audio recorded by a camera arrives without it: Final Cut does not put it in the XML, so there is nothing to carry.

The session also says which take each clip is. A sound recordist writes the scene, the take, the sound roll and a note about the take into the recording itself, and Final Cut keeps all four. The conversion carries them into the session, where they land in the fields Pro Tools has for them — the Clip Info panel, and the Scene, Take and Sound Roll columns of the Workspace. Nothing is invented: material that was never given a scene, such as music, effects or a phone recording, arrives as it always did.

What the recorder wrote beyond the take is what an embedded delivery cannot carry. Pro Tools writes its own metadata into the files it creates when it imports one, and it keeps the scene, the take and the roll and nothing else, so the note, the shoot date and the rest of the recorder's fields only travel beside the AAF. If they matter to whoever mixes, deliver the audio beside the AAF instead of inside it: it is one setting, and everything else about the delivery is the same.

Where Final Cut and the recorder's own file disagree on one of these, Metadata priority in the settings column decides which one travels, and the report names the difference with both values.

Opening it in other DAWs

With channels one per track, which is the default, the delivery is standard AAF, and every application that reads AAF opens it from its own import menu: Nuendo, Cubase, Fairlight, Resolve, Media Composer. What each of them then does with it is theirs. AAF is a standard about what a file contains, not an instruction about how to show it, so two programs opening the same delivery can put the markers in different places, or take a fade one way and a level another.

Everything this manual says about how a delivery looks once it is open was established in Pro Tools, by writing an AAF and importing it. That still holds for pan, for the shape of a fade and for the names on the tracks. The markers are the one thing that has now been opened in each of them, one project at a time, and the answers were different enough to be worth writing down.

• Pro Tools — memory locations, on their frame, with the kind in front of your words. ⌘5 lists them.
• DaVinci Resolve — reads them from the AAF, but only with Import log messages as markers ticked in its import dialog, which is off by default. Leave Link to source camera files unticked while you are there, or Resolve goes looking for your rushes instead of using the audio the delivery carries.
• Media Composer — AAF is Avid's own format and markers arrive as locators. Not tested here; that one is Avid's documentation and other people's accounts rather than a session we opened.
• Nuendo and Cubase — neither reads markers from an AAF. That is not a gap in the file: Nuendo's own AAF export carries none either, and Steinberg's documentation lists the ways markers can be imported without an AAF among them. Use the CSV or the MIDI beside the delivery — see Marker files in Step 4.
• Premiere Pro — takes no markers from an AAF, and has no marker import of its own that either file fits. If your markers have to reach Premiere, they reach it through the Final Cut FCPXML rather than through this.

Audio that goes inside the AAF is written the way the audio applications write it themselves: the whole WAV file inside the container, its format declared and its codec named. Checked by opening a delivery in Pro Tools and in Cubase.

If some program still will not take it, or opens it empty, deliver the audio beside the AAF instead of inside it. It is one setting in Step 4 and nothing else about the delivery changes: the same tracks, the same levels, the same media, the same report. Hand over the whole folder then, and do not move anything out of it.

The Settings window

Everything up to here is about one delivery. This window, fcp2aaf ▸ Settings or ⌘, is for what is not: the licence, the switches you set on the first afternoon, and what the app is keeping on your disk. It is three tabs, and they are not steps: nothing in it has to be visited before anything else.

General is what somebody arrives looking for. At the top, the licence: which plan is running, who it is licensed to, the Mac it is running on and, for a pass, when it stops, with the button that releases the seat. Under it, Play a sound when a conversion finishes, and Check for updates automatically. There is more about the licence in What it costs, at the end of this page.

Interface is taste. The theme (match macOS, light or dark) and the language, English or Spanish. Every word this application writes changes as you move the picker; the menu bar's standard items and the buttons in an open panel belong to macOS and are built when the app launches, so those change the next time you open it.

Show help is on, and it is the line under every setting in the column beside the timeline. Once you know them, turn it off and the column shows only the settings; the warnings still appear. It is also in the View menu, ⇧⌘H, so you can switch it from the window itself.

Waveforms ▸ Generate them when a timeline opens is there too, off by default. Turned on, every document you open starts decoding by itself, with the same progress panel and the same button to stop it. Drawing them means decoding the whole session, so opening takes longer; that work stays in the cache and the conversion afterwards is almost instant. It is for whoever works one way every time: open, look, deliver. If you set the handles after opening, the button in the window serves you better, because then you decide when it is paid for.

Advanced holds the two things that are about this installation rather than about tonight's delivery: what the cache is costing, which has its own section below, and what leaves the machine.

Report crashes is off, and it stays off until you switch it on. On, it sends the kind of failure and where in this app it happened — never the name of a project, a clip, a file or a folder, and never your IP address. Switching it off takes effect the next time the app opens, because the reporter cannot be stopped once it has started.

The cache

To convert, every region has to be decoded to a plain WAV on disk first. Those files are the cache, so there is nothing here to switch on or off — the question is only which disk they go on and how long they stay.

Automatic needs nothing set up, and it is what almost everybody should leave it set to. The decoded audio goes in a hidden .fcp2aaf-cache folder at the top of the disk your Final Cut document is on, where your material already is and not on your startup disk, and it is emptied when you quit the app. Three things follow from that. Converting the same project again only decodes what changed, so several versions in one evening cost the decoding once. Listening to a clip fills the same folder, so an afternoon of checking the edit leaves the conversion less to do. And when the delivery goes to that same disk, with the audio beside the AAF, each region is cloned into the delivery instead of copied, so the delivery takes no room of its own on the disk and the wait at the end of a long conversion is gone.

Manual is for a machine with a scratch disk, or for anybody who wants the reuse to survive quitting. It adds three rows:

• Location — Same disk as the document (what automatic does), This Mac, which puts it in this Mac's own cache folder wherever the project is, or A folder… you pick yourself.
• Empty it — When the app closes, After a number of days, with the number yours to set, or Never.
• Limit — how many gigabytes it may take. Leave it empty for automatic, which is a tenth of the space free on the disk it is on, never less than 5 GB and never more than 20, and the row says underneath what that works out to here. Past the limit, the regions untouched longest go first — so the project in front of you is the last to go, without a rule having to name it.

At the foot of the section is what the cache is holding right now, and the button that empties it.

Three things it will not do. Nothing is ever deleted while anything is running, a conversion or a run of waveforms — the controls that could are disabled until it finishes. A conversion that fails or is stopped never clears anything, because what it had already decoded is exactly what the retry needs. And moving the cache asks first, because moving it empties the folder it was in; cancel and nothing has happened at all.

When something goes wrong

• Files could not be found — they have moved or been renamed since the export, and the paths in the FCPXML no longer lead anywhere. Put them back where they were, or relink them in Final Cut and export the timeline again.
• macOS will not let a file be read — macOS asks the first time the app reads Documents, Desktop, Downloads or an external disk. If you said no, allow it under System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Files and Folders, or copy the material somewhere it can read.
• A file is 0 bytes — macOS has it in iCloud and left only the placeholder on disk. Open it in the Finder to download it in full and convert again.
• A file could not be opened partway through — it moved, was renamed, or the external drive it was on went away while the conversion ran. The conversion finishes with what had already been read, and the report names what is missing. Put it back, or reconnect the drive, and convert again.
• A file will not decode — it is on the disk, but empty, damaged, or not audio. The conversion finishes without its clips, and the report names the file with its path, each clip with its timecode, and what to do: transcode it again or point at another copy.
• A stretch decoded with damage — part of a file is damaged. That audio is delivered, and the report lists it under Repaired with the clip and the file's path: listen to it, and if the damage can be heard, replace the file with an undamaged copy.
• The channel count does not match — the file holds fewer channels than the timeline uses. The ones it has arrive, the missing one is left out, and the report names it with its clip and the file's path. It is usually a relink to another version of the file: link the right one and convert again.
• Relinked material has another sample rate — say, the 96 kHz originals where the edit was cut with 48 kHz copies. It arrives complete and in sync, and the report says it is not the file the edit was cut with, so you can confirm it is the take you expect.
• A clip ends early, or is not in the AAF — its recording runs out before the clip does. The report says how many milliseconds are missing and from which file, or that the clip is not in the AAF when the recording had already ended where the clip begins. If Final Cut plays sound there, the copy of the file on your disk is shorter than the one the edit was made with: replace it and convert again.
• A value in the XML could not be read — a time, a level, a fade or a keyframe another tool wrote wrong. Only that is set aside and the rest of the document is read; the report quotes the value as it was written beside the clip. Correct it in the document or export again from Final Cut.
• An audition brought the wrong take — the take selected in Final Cut is the one that travels. If what arrived is not what you wanted, select it again in Final Cut and export once more. The takes left behind are counted in Notes and in the report.
• A clip will not play when you click it — the file has moved. The window says which one; point it at the folder as in Step 2.
• MXF — if the audio cannot be got out of an MXF, extract it as WAV and relink in Final Cut before exporting.
• The session opens at the wrong timecode — check the start timecode in Settings. By default it is whatever the project says.
• Pan sounds wrong in Pro Tools — channels are probably grouped in stereo; set them to one per track.
• A DAW will not import the AAF — put the audio beside the AAF instead of inside it and convert again. It is one setting and it changes nothing else about the delivery. Hand over the whole folder afterwards, not the AAF on its own.
• 32-bit is not offered — the audio is set to go inside the AAF, which cannot hold it. Put the audio beside the AAF instead.
• The disk will not take the delivery — full, mounted read-only, a folder you have no permission for, or a drive that went away mid-conversion. The app says so in a sentence and leaves no half-written AAF. Free some room, or deliver somewhere else, and convert again.
• The disk is filling up as you work — that is the decoded audio, and it goes when you quit. If you need the room before then, Settings ▸ Advanced says how much it is holding and empties it in one press.

If something fails in another way, the details can be copied straight out of the problem it reports. Send them, and the .fcpxml if you can: that is what makes it reproducible.

Glossary

• AAF — the interchange format between edit and mix. It describes what sounds, when, and at what level, and either carries the audio or points at it.
• Locked cut — a picture edit that will not change again, and the point at which it goes to sound.
• Turnover — handing the locked cut to sound: the AAF, its audio and whatever the sound department asked for. It is what fcp2aaf delivers.
• Essence — the audio itself, as opposed to the description of it. Embedded essence is inside the AAF; referenced essence sits beside it.
• Region — a piece of an original file: the piece a clip in the edit needs, plus handles if you asked for them.
• Handles — extra seconds on each side of a region, so a clip can be stretched in the mix without going back to the rushes.
• Conform — cut exactly that region out of the original and leave it at the session's rate and bit depth.
• Role and subrole — the label Final Cut classifies each clip with (dialogue, music, effects, and their subdivisions). Here it is what decides which track a clip lands on.
• Slot — each audio channel inside the AAF. A mono track is one slot; an ungrouped pair is two.
• NDF / DF — how timecode is counted at 29.97 and 59.94. A drop-frame label is written with a semicolon, 01:00:59;29, exactly as Final Cut and Pro Tools write it. It changes how times are numbered, never where the audio sounds.
• Sample rate — how many samples per second the audio has: 48,000 Hz is the norm in picture work.
• L-cut / J-cut — the two split edits, where a shot's sound is cut apart from its picture: a J-cut brings the sound in before the picture, an L-cut holds it on past the cut. It is a position in time, so it travels on its own — the audio lands where it played.
• Spot to Original — placing a clip in Pro Tools at the timecode it was recorded at. It works because the source timecode travels inside the AAF.

What it costs

Projects up to 5 minutes are free, for anybody, with every feature switched on. It is not a trial and it does not expire: inside those five minutes nothing at all is held back.

Beyond five minutes it is $15 for a 3-day pass, or $79 once and for life, updates included. There is no subscription. Both are on sale now, and until 30 September the code 3DAYPASS puts the pass at $9 and LIFETIME puts the licence at $39 — enter the code at checkout, because it is not applied for you.

A longer project is still read, planned and laid out like any other: the window opens it, the tracks are all there to look at, and a line under the list says how long it runs and that the free plan converts up to five minutes. What waits is Convert, until a licence is activated — activate one and it comes alive without reopening the document.

A licence is entered and lives in fcp2aaf ▸ Settings ▸ General, which is also where it says which plan is running, the Mac it is running on, how many Mac changes you have left and, for a pass, when it stops. Releasing it there hands the seat back, so the same licence can be activated on another Mac: it is not a second purchase. A licence can change Mac up to five times in any 30 days, and the window says how many changes are left before you release anything — see how your licence works. The licence badge in the window's toolbar opens that tab directly.

The free plan needs no licence at all — download it and convert. It stays that way whether or not you ever buy anything: it is a plan and not a trial, and the five minutes are not counting down to a price.

How your licence works

How your licence works, so you get the most out of it and never lose an afternoon to it.

• One Mac at a time. A licence is active on one Mac. Enter the key on another and it will tell you the first one still holds it: release that one and activate this one. You can do it from the new Mac even if the old one is lost, stolen or dead. That is what the change is for, so nobody has to write to support on the morning of a delivery.
• Five changes every 30 days. Each one comes back 30 days after you use it, not all together at the end of a month. For example: if you move your licence from your Mac Studio to your MacBook Pro on 1 October, that is your first change. Move it back to the Mac Studio on 7 October and that is the second, leaving three available. On 1 November, once 30 days have passed since the first, that change is free again; on 7 November the second comes back too, and you are back to all five. Settings ▸ General always shows how many are left and when the next one comes back.
• Need more than five? If an exceptional situation ever means you need more changes than you have available, write to support: we will be happy to give you a few more.
• How often it needs the internet. The free version never checks anything at all. A 3-day pass is confirmed when you activate it and never asks again for the whole of its life. A lifetime licence is confirmed every 30 days, and the app does it by itself every time it opens with a connection, so working online you will never notice it.

If it could not be confirmed when the app opened, the window says that, rather than telling you that you are on the free version. What is missing at that moment is the connection and not the licence, and it is almost always a VPN, a post house's firewall, or one of the filters that block recently registered domains.

There, under your plan, is the whole block. It names the domain to allow, fcp2aaf.com, and lets you copy it to ask whoever looks after the network, along with its subdomains and over HTTPS. As soon as the connection is back the app tries again on its own and the notice goes without you closing anything; you can also press Try again. Neither the retry nor the reconnection spends one of your Mac changes: only activating the licence on a different Mac does that.

Once it is confirmed you can put your VPN, your proxy or your firewall back as they were: the connection is only needed at the moment of confirming, not while you convert. With a 3-day pass that moment is a single one, when you activate it. With a lifetime licence it comes round again after 30 days.