Every post-production workflow has at least one handoff point where something can go wrong in a way that costs you hours. For most jobs that involve Premiere, Resolve, and Pro Tools, that point is the conform. The XML or AAF that looked fine when you exported it somehow arrives broken at the other end. Audio is out of sync. Clips are missing. The sound editor is emailing you at 7pm.
I've done enough of these roundtrips to know that the failures are almost never random. They're predictable. The same mistakes show up on the same kinds of timelines. Once you know what they are, you can engineer them out before you export anything.
Before you export anything: clean the timeline
This is the step that gets skipped most often and causes the most problems. Premiere timelines accumulate mess — effects, transitions, colour corrections, merged clips, nesting. Most of that doesn't survive the handoff gracefully.
My process before any export:
- Duplicate the sequence. Work on the duplicate. Never touch the original edit. You'll need it when something goes wrong downstream.
- Flatten all merged clips. Merged clips — where you've synced audio and video in Premiere — are notorious for creating AAF export problems. The audio frequently ends up out of sync in Pro Tools. Separate the clips back to their original camera audio before you export.
- Remove effects and colour corrections. Resolve doesn't care about your Premiere colour corrections, and they can confuse the XML. Remove them from the working copy.
- Collapse nested sequences. If you can. Not always possible, but nested sequences can cause relinking issues in Resolve.
Choosing your format: XML vs AAF
For a Premiere-to-Resolve handoff, use FCP XML. It carries more information than EDL or AAF, Resolve reads it reliably, and it handles mixed frame rates better than the alternatives. Export from Premiere via File > Export > Final Cut Pro XML.
For the audio handoff to Pro Tools, you need AAF. XML doesn't carry audio in a way Pro Tools can use. Export this separately — a dedicated audio-only timeline with the settings below. Don't try to do the audio and video handoff with the same file.
In Premiere's AAF export dialog: set audio to Embed Audio with Breakout to Mono turned on. This splits polyphonic clips into individual mono tracks, which fixes most of the relink and phase problems that show up in Pro Tools. Export at the same sample rate as your deliverable spec.
The Resolve import
Media organisation before you import matters more than people give it credit for. If your source files are spread across multiple drive paths, relinking in Resolve becomes a manual job. Consolidate to a single directory structure before you hand off — or at minimum, make sure everything lives under one root folder you can point Resolve at.
When you import the XML into Resolve:
- Go to Project Settings > Image Scaling and set it to Centre crop with no resizing if your Premiere sequence had mixed resolutions.
- Let Resolve auto-relink from the folder you point it at. If it misses clips, check for frame rate mismatches first — Resolve will reject clips that don't match the timeline frame rate.
- Once relinked, check ten clips at random against your Premiere source. Verify in/out points, colour space, and audio sync. Do this before you start grading, not after.
Sending audio to Pro Tools
A few things that will save you a call from the sound editor:
- No picture in the AAF. Pro Tools doesn't need it, and including video can cause the session to hang on import. Send a separate reference video — ProRes or DNxHD with guide audio baked in — alongside the AAF.
- Don't embed audio. Use Unembedded (separate files). Embedded audio in large sessions causes import failures and bloats the AAF to a size that's unpleasant to work with.
- Add handles. At least 24 frames on either side. Sound editors need room to extend clips for room tone, fade in room, and fix edits. If you don't give them handles, they'll ask for a new export.
- Match your timecode start. Make sure your sequence starts at the same hour as your delivery spec — usually 01:00:00:00. Timecode mismatches are the single most common cause of sync issues that don't get caught until the mix.
When the conform breaks anyway
It will, at some point. When it does, the fastest path to diagnosing the problem is to compare a handful of clips in both the source timeline and the conform side by side. Most issues come down to one of three things: a frame rate mismatch, a merged clip that didn't get flattened, or a media path that changed between when you captured and when you exported.
The duplicate sequence you made at the start is your reference. Go back to it, identify the specific clips that broke, and re-export just those sections if you need to.
The conform isn't glamorous work, but it's where a lot of productions quietly fall apart. A checklist at the export stage takes five minutes. The alternative is spending half a day relinking media or explaining to a sound editor why their Pro Tools session is out of sync. The five minutes is worth it.