Sending sound files to sound studio

Hi!

I need to export sound out of my project and send it to sound studio for fixing. Demands from the sound studio are - .omf or .aac with 5 second handles (pre and after rolls). As I understand X doesn't offer .omf export so I'll have to stick with .aac. So, I go to SHARE - MASTER FILE - AUDIO ONLY - AAC. But I don't see any options to decide how long the pre and after rolls of each sound clip should be. Does it mean that the sound guy will receive just the exact length of sound as it is used in my edit? Also, the output file is suspiciously small - just 180 mb for a 90 minute film. And after the export I see that FCPX has exported not .aac file but .m4a. Why? Does it mean that it is the same as .aac ?

I also tried exporting .aac with an option 'audio roles as separate files' (hoping that it may mean that it will give the possibility for the sound guy if needed to use longer sound clips than in my edit). But then all of a sudden it is not .aac file any more but turns into .aiff file. The file size now is 1,6 GB.

I think I really miss something here. Can you guys please explain me this sound thing so that I can prepare the sound export properly for the sound studio!

Thanks.

I do audio work (probably more than video work, once again), and I'd never want to "clean up" ACC files. Mpeg-4 based, highly compressed. I only work with AIFF or uncompressed WAV files from clients, or my own productions.

Anyway, if he wants .ACC, then you give that to him. But what he's asking for, you won't get out of FCPX. Not sure if X2Pro is an option or not. Someone more familiar with that utility app can answer better.

A "Master File" is the whole Timeline mixed down to a single file, stereo (or whatever it is formatted to), the whole Timeline, period.

Roles As Separate Files will simply make one file, the entire duration of the Timeline, mixing all audio assigned to a specific Role, to a single audio file. It is called Media Stems in the industry. If he can work with Media Stems, that's be the way to go. And yes, Media Stems must be the highest quality for what they're mostly used for, thus uncompressed AIFF.

But there currently is no way to get what you want out of FCPX natively. Hopefully someone here has a workaround.

Audio is a fraction of the amount of data that video is. So when you do export audio only, you'll get files that are extremely smaller than if you had exported video only files, or video+audio files.

Unfortunately FCPX won't allow you to keep handles when exporting. There is a software out there that can help you with that, it's called "Clip Exporter". I don't know what aufio specs it will handle but you might just google and have a look. Good luck!

Wouldn't your sound studio be rather asking for an OMF or AAF export file ( not aac, which is actually an mpeg4 based audio file codec with the .m4a extension ) ?
That's a totally different thing.
But even if you used a "translating" tool like X2Pro to send an FCPX sourced edit for sound post as an AAF file, I'm not sure about being able to keep handles of your elements.

See for yourself if this may still fit your needs.

www.x2pro.net/


Good Luck

alex

You need X2Pro. Not the LE Version, but the full version. It'll do exactly wha you need with one click. Make suer you have all your separate Roles set properly.

We do this a lot for sound finishing, and X2Pro will work great and will let you specify whatever you want for handles. AAF is really just a more advanced form of OMF, and they only reason you may want to export an OMF is if whoever is doing your sound has an old version of ProTools or something like that. Also, tell it not to use referenced clips and just have your audio embedded in the AAF. This makes it a lot simpler. Roles and subroles should be assigned properly.

The only problems we have had are some sync issues with RED files that I believe have been worked out, however you should be aware that X2Pro doesn't support audio re-timing, so if you're doing any of that, it's best to export those bits out to AIFF or WAV and bring it back in. In my experience, audio re-timing isn't really done that much anyway unless there's a special effect you're going for, or you're re-timing footage shot at odd framerates, etc.