Why the trial is the whole argument
Every converter in this category promises the same sentence: your Final Cut timeline arrives in Pro Tools with the tracks named and the audio in the right place. The sentence is easy to write and the difference between two of them is not visible until a real project goes through — your project, with the multicam somebody synced by timecode, the four-microphone rush, the music trailed under the closing shot.
So the question that decides this is not which feature list is longer. It is which one you can run before you pay.
fcp2aaf is free up to five minutes with nothing held back: not a watermark, not a locked setting, not a countdown. Open your own project, look at the tracks it plans, listen to a clip, convert a five-minute stretch of it and open the AAF in Pro Tools. If it is not right, you have lost nothing.
What the window shows you before anything is decoded
A Final Cut export is a document about somebody else's edit, and the usual way to find out what a converter made of it is to convert and look at the result. fcp2aaf draws it first.
- Every track, laid out. One track per microphone, named after the subrole the editor gave it, in the order they will arrive.
- Every clip where it falls, with its fades, its crossfades drawn as crossfades, and real waveforms decoded from your own recordings.
- What will not survive, listed before you start: a channel the file does not have, an angle with no audio, a fade shape AAF cannot carry.
- What is not on the drive. Offline material is drawn as offline, counted, and left out of the delivery rather than stopping it, and you can save the list of missing files to send back to the editor.
- Click a clip and hear it, decoded the same way the conversion will decode it.
The parts of an edit that are easy to get wrong
These are the cases fcp2aaf was built around, because each of them fails quietly: the AAF opens, the session looks right, and what is wrong is only found in the mix.
- A four-microphone rush. P2, XDCAM and Canon XF write four separate mono streams and Final Cut still declares one asset. Read carelessly, all four tracks carry microphone one, at the right level, under a report saying everything converted.
- A multicam synced by timecode. Its clock starts at the earliest angle's stamp, not at zero. Walked without rebasing it, whole interviews disappear and nothing says so.
- A J-cut or an L-cut. When an editor drags the audio past the picture, Final Cut writes a second window for the sound. Read the picture's instead and the music under the closing shot stops mid-phrase.
- A microphone the editor switched off. It reaches Pro Tools at −∞ as clip gain, on the track it would have had, so the mixer can bring it back rather than meeting a note asking them to mute it.
- Material that is not on the drive. A missing temp music track does not refuse a delivery of thirty tracks that never touch it.
The audio is cut from your own recordings
fcp2aaf does not pass audio through and does not ask Final Cut to render anything. It reads the paths in the FCPXML, opens your original rushes and cuts exactly the regions the edit uses, with as much handle around each clip as you ask for. WAV, BWF, RF64, AIFF, CAF, FLAC, MP3, MP4, MOV and MXF, at any size.
You choose whether the audio goes inside the AAF or beside it in a folder. Both carry the original timecode of every recording, so “spot to original timecode” works on the other end.
fcp2aaf goes one way. A Final Cut timeline becomes an AAF. It does not read an AAF and it does not write an FCPXML, so it is not a round trip and nothing here pretends otherwise.