Avid Behaving Badly #11: AAF export files sometimes contain zero audio information for random clips

My work has upgraded to Avid 6.5.4.  While it's a vast improvement over 5.5 (you know, the one with the user experience akin to stabbing yourself repeatedly in the dick), it's got some seriously annoying bugs.  Mostly because they either don't throw error messages at all (like the one I'm talking about here), or because no matter what the error messages are, the solution is to reset the PRAM and delete the site settings and user folder within the project.  Fucking buggy ass application, man.

But I digress.  Avid has been doing some fucked up shit in this new version, and I'm here to tell you how to work around it.  Why me?  Because the entire fucking internet doesn't seem to know a goddamn about this AAF problem I've been having.  Fuck you, internet.  You don't know shit about Avid (well, okay, after I post this, you'll know a small amount of shit, I'll grant you that).

And now I'm digressing again!  Okay, on to business:

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Randomly when creating AAF file exports (using the "embedded in AAF setting), Avid will change one or more clips to contain no data.  When we send the file to Mix, they report back that "the clip at timecode XX;XX;XX;XX on Track A2 has no audio but in the chase video, there should be some sound there."

Well, shit, Avid, there sure as fuck is sound there in the sequence that I exported!

No errors are reported during export.  Nothing is posted to the console.  The file size is even the exact same as if you export the same file again and don't get an error.

So how do you check for this?

You have to import your exported AAF back into Avid and then manually fucking check every clip to make sure there's sound there.  It goes faster if you turn on audio waveforms and just check clips that show as flatlines, but it's still a huge fucking waste of time.

To make matters worse, the bug is literally random.  Exporting the same sequence as an AAF twice will result in different clips losing audio data.  Sometimes it will result in no clips losing data, but fuck if I can tell you when that is without goddamn checking the entire thing again.

So remember, when you pay $1,000 for Avid, you're paying them to cost you $30-$100 in AE time every time you output an AAF.

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