Standard AAF is the default, and that matters here
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.
The one non-standard setting groups channels into a stereo track. Leave it off for Nuendo and Cubase: one channel per track is what reads cleanly, and it is what the default already does.
Roles become tracks
Every Final Cut role and subrole arrives as its own track, in the order you choose, named the way you name it. Overlapping clips within a role spill onto extra tracks so Nuendo never meets two clips fighting for one lane, and clips joined by a crossfade stay together.
You arrange the track list, rename anything, and drop the tracks you do not need before converting — and an excluded track is audio that is never even decoded, so it costs nothing.
Fades, automation and clip gain arrive in place
Volume keyframes become automation, clip gain rides on the clip, and pan travels. Fades can be written as clip fades or as automation. Crossfades, J-cuts and L-cuts land where the sound actually played, not where the picture was cut.
One file, or a folder
A self-contained AAF with the audio inside it is the simplest thing to open in a fresh Nuendo project. A referenced delivery is a folder holding the AAF and the conformed WAVs beside it, which writes faster and takes less space. Sample rate follows your source or is set to 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4 or 192 kHz.
Audio inside the AAF is written the way Nuendo and Cubase write it. The container carries the whole WAV file, its format declared and its codec named, which is the shape Steinberg's own export produces. Checked by opening the delivery in Cubase 15 and in Pro Tools. If some other program still will not take it, the other shape is one setting away.
Markers arrive beside the AAF, not inside it
Neither Nuendo nor Cubase reads markers out of an AAF. Measured rather than assumed, three ways: Steinberg's own documentation lists how markers can be imported and an AAF is not on the list; Nuendo's own AAF export carries none; and a delivery imported into Nuendo arrives with every track and an empty marker window.
So fcp2aaf writes the list as a file beside the AAF instead, on request — two switches under Marker files, off unless you ask for them. Every marker, with its timecode, its name and its kind. Nothing about the AAF changes: its own markers travel either way, for whoever opens the same delivery in Pro Tools.
- Nuendo imports either file. The CSV is the fuller one: a dialog maps each column, so you choose what the marker is called on the track.
- Cubase imports only the MIDI. Its CSV marker import is a Nuendo feature Cubase does not have.
- For the MIDI, turn on Preferences ▸ MIDI ▸ MIDI File ▸ Import Markers first, drop the file where the session starts, and leave the project tempo at its default 120.
- For the CSV, set Ignore First Rows to 1, map the timecode column to Timecode In, and map the marker's text to Description — there is no attribute called Name.
If something does not arrive
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.
Pro Tools is what this converter is tested against, by writing deliveries and opening them. Nuendo and Cubase were opened for the markers in particular, one project at a time, which is where everything this page says about those comes from. Anywhere else they land differently from what is written here, an email is worth more than an afternoon of looking for a setting: say which application, which version, and what arrived.
