Nightmare with AAF files, audio issues (short film)

Hi everyone,

I have had a year long nightmare now with Final Cut X and a short film I have worked on and am coming to the end of any ideas how to fix this. I wonder if any of you had similar issues and know a way to solve them. I will try to keep it brief:

I have directed a short film a little bit over a year ago, shot on a Blackmagic camera and with external sound (professional sound recordist). Since the project was low budget, I hired a video editor (for a polished rough cut) who didn't have years and years of experience, but was very good and had edited short films before, so he knew how it all worked. I normally edit with Adobe Premiere, but when the editor told me that his main software is Final Cut X, I thought "Oh well, I have worked with other versions of Final Cut before which was never a problem, so Final Cut X will probably be the same in case I need to make a few changes myself afterwards". So I hired him, he edited the project to his best capacity and sent it back to me so I could do a few last changes myself. From this point onwards, it's getting hard not to constantly swear.

It took me almost one solid week to get used to Final Cut X and this silly magnetic timeline, and I am a professional editor with over 10 years of experience. You may ask yourself why I didn't edit the film myself and in Premiere in the first place... it's because I just can't edit my own films, I get too carried away on little bits and just need someone else to do the pre-work.

When I finally managed to pull the edit together, I was going to export an AAF to send to the audio mixer (we had various sound issues on set and it definitely needs audio mixing) and realised that Final Cut X does not export AAF (***?) straight from the software and you need this add on software.
Already knowing that I will never touch Final Cut X ever again, I gave the project back to the original editor who had this add on (x2Pro), but when he exported it he said that there were errors coming up and sound dropping out.

The audio mixer also had issues to import the track into his mixing software.

So I then decided to give the project to yet another (but very very experienced) Final Cut X editor hoping he could help to solve the problem. This has been a back and forth between me, him and the audio mixer for the past 3 weeks now. Nothing we're doing or exporting works at all. Since I am starting to get a little bit lost myself now of what exactly is going on, here are a couple of comments from the audio mixer as to what the problems are, in chronological order after trying everything they could (after every message the editor would re-export either an AAF or XML file, neither of which have worked so far):

I'm getting an error message about the AAF file on Pro Tools so I can't use Pro Tools for this. I've Tried opening it in Logic Pro X but Logic Pro X can't see the sound files because the names of the files have been prefixed. When I try to force Logic to use the renamed files it crashes. I have tried opening the AAF on DaVinci Resolve and I'm getting an error message about the video being absent from the timeline. I get the same error message even with video on the timeline so perhaps there is some kind of video metadata being exported in the AAF files that my audio workstations can't handle.

I opened up the last AAF file in Adobe Premiere Pro and it started asking for mov files and mp3 files from the video edit that obviously wouldn't have been exported for an audio only AAF so - I personally believe - that somewhere along the export chain some settings need to be changed to make it work for audio import. Andy's (editor) going to send me an XML file directly from FCPX which I will try to process via Premiere or Resolve. However if the XML file also requires video and audio files that I don't have then I would need to get a complete copy of the film edit on a hard drive and do my own export. It's a mad final solution if Andy can't create an AAF or XML that works in Pro Tools/Logic Pro/Cubase/Audition etc

"I downloaded the same version of Resolve that Andy (editor) has and I was able to open the project on the PC version, however the audio is playing back at the wrong sample rate and the new audio section within Resolve (Fairlight) is too crude to enable me to correct this. I have tried exporting the project from Resolve myself and I'm getting exactly the same errors that I was getting with Andy's files across all audio apps (Audition, Cubase, Pro Tools, Logic Pro etc) on both Mac and PC. I have to conclude that Resolve is the weak link in the export chain.

"I couldn't get the file to open on any system except Resolve, and Resolve was playing the audio back at the wrong sample rate so everything was pitched too high. There are no controls in Resolve to change the audio sample rate and when I tried to export a new AAF myself I just got exactly the same problems. I don't know what else to do my end"

Has anyone of you any idea what the issue could be based on this information? Could something be wrong with the audio files altogether? Or could it be converting it via X2Pro?

Thanks so very much,

Nadine