Final Cut Pro to DaVinci Resolve

The default output is standard AAF. One optional setting, the Audio Channel Combiner, groups a clip's channels into a stereo track and is not part of the AAF standard — it is off unless you ask for it, so what you deliver opens the same way in every application that reads AAF.

Resolve reads standard AAF. The Audio Channel Combiner is the one setting that produces something outside the standard, so leave it off — which is the default.

Each Final Cut role and subrole arrives as its own track, contiguous and in the order you set. Overlapping clips within a role are spilled onto extra tracks, and crossfaded clips stay on one track so the fade survives.

Before converting you see the whole session drawn, hear any clip, and set the track order, the names and which tracks travel.

fcp2aaf does not pass audio through. It reads the paths Final Cut wrote into the FCPXML, opens your original recordings, and cuts from them exactly the regions the edit uses, with as much or as little handle around each clip as you ask for. WAV, BWF, RF64, AIFF, CAF, FLAC, MP3, MP4, MOV and MXF are read straight from the drive, at any size.

That means Resolve opens with something to trim at every cut, rather than clips that end exactly on the edit. You set the handle length per delivery.

Resolve reads the AAF's markers, and it does it only when Import log messages as markers is ticked in the Import AAF dialog. That box is off by default, so a delivery full of markers can arrive with none showing and nothing to say why. Tick it, choose a colour beside it, and they land on their frame with the kind in front of your own words.

While you are in that dialog, leave Link to source camera files unticked. Ticked, Resolve goes looking for your original rushes instead of using the audio the delivery carries — which throws away the conform, the handles and the channel mapping fcp2aaf did.

A referenced delivery writes the conformed WAVs into a folder beside the AAF under readable names. If Resolve ever asks where the media is, it is pointing at that one folder. An embedded AAF carries the audio inside it and needs no folder at all.

AAF is a standard about what a file contains, not an instruction about how to show it, and every application that reads one decides for itself which parts to use. Two programs opening the same delivery can put the markers in different places, or take a fade one way and a level another. What fcp2aaf settles is what goes into the file — drawn for you before you convert, and listed in the report afterwards.

And if a program will not take the AAF, deliver the audio beside it instead of inside it and try again. It is one setting and nothing else about the delivery changes: the same tracks, the same levels, the same media, the same report.

Pro Tools is what this converter is tested against, by writing deliveries and opening them. Resolve and Fairlight are not, so if something lands differently from what this page describes, say which application, which version, and what arrived — that is the only way it can be looked at for your program in particular.