Premiere opens the AAF as audio tracks
The AAF carries each Final Cut role and subrole as its own track, every clip where it fell, and the clip gain, automation and fades the edit had. How much of that Premiere shows you is Premiere's own decision — it is an editing application reading a sound format, and it reads one more plainly than a DAW does.
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.
What it carries, and what it does not
It carries the audio edit. It does not carry the picture — fcp2aaf writes an audio AAF, and there is no video track in it. If you want the video edit in Premiere as well, import the FCPXML into Premiere for that; the two imports are separate and do different jobs.
Why send audio through AAF at all
Because the FCPXML route does not rebuild the sound the way the edit had it — the roles, the overlapping clips spilled onto their own tracks, the split edits, the conformed handles. The AAF does. fcp2aaf cuts the audio from your originals with the handles you set, so there is room to work at every cut.
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.
Send the audio beside the AAF, not inside it
For Premiere this is not a preference, it is the setting that makes the delivery work. Premiere does not resolve the media paths written inside an AAF — measured, and measured the hard way round: an AAF that Premiere itself exported with the audio embedded could not be relinked either. With the audio in a folder beside the AAF it imports without trouble.
So choose Beside the AAF under How it travels to the AAF, and hand over the whole folder. Nothing else about the delivery changes: the same tracks, the same levels, the same media, the same report.
Markers do not travel to Premiere
Premiere takes no markers from an AAF, and it writes none into the ones it exports. It also has no marker import of its own that a list from elsewhere fits — the CSV and MIDI files fcp2aaf can write beside a delivery are for Nuendo and Cubase, and Premiere reads neither.
If your markers have to reach Premiere, they reach it the other way: Premiere reads a Final Cut FCPXML, which is the document you already have. That import is separate from this one and does a different job — the picture and its markers there, the audio session here.
Set it up once, hand it over
You choose the handles, the sample rate, the bit depth and which tracks travel, with the session drawn in front of you and any clip playable.
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.
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. Premiere Pro is 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.
