Pro Tools Manually Relinking Multiple Files without Name or File ID

[u/jumygrease]

I am trying to relink some audio files from an AAF in my Pro Tools Studio session (2026.4.1). The AAF was made in DaVinci Resolve. The audio files from the AAF have different file names than the source audio. There is also no unique file name to match. I attempted to manually relink with little luck. I matched one candidate file, but it would only link one half of the stereo file and not the other. I am also dealing with 174 unlinked audio files, so that is not a realistic workflow for relinking. I also tried copying the source files into the audio files folder, saving, relaunching Pro Tools, and automatic relinking, but that didn't work. I copied the source files into the clip list but had no luck with restarting the session and trying to relink.

Any advice on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated. If there is a solution on to fix this on DaVinci with those export settings for the AAF, that would be appreciated as well.

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[u/filterdecay]

The best thing to do is get a new export. I’ve been in a similar situation and I knew exact file lengths and was able to force link every file by length. But it’s one by one.

[u/jumygrease → u/filterdecay]

That’s my new plan of action. Hard to trust editors with proper workflow sometimes!

[u/tonypizzicato]

I haven’t exported AAF from DaVinci but I would definitely suspect that your issue is the exporting. Check all of the settings thoroughly and try again. PT ain’t gonna make it easy for you

[u/jumygrease → u/tonypizzicato]

The PT team has given me the same response so I think that may be the solution to try.

[u/Soundchaser21]

Did you use the Protools export or Avid AAF export? You must use the protools export. Embedding the audio might help with linking files.

[u/jumygrease → u/Soundchaser21]

Supposedly the pro tools export was used but I will most likely have them make another export and supervise it.

[u/tha_lode → u/[deleted]]

That said if there is no way to get a better version , 174 clips is tedious, but if the lenghts match then maybe manually relinking is your only choice. Is the mismatched names a predictable thing? Something you can batch-rename ypur way out of? Like odd characters or some kind of numbering or something added or missing?

[u/jumygrease → u/tha_lode]

I might try and look into the batch rename. All the files have extra numbers added to the start of the clip name, based on the davinci timeline.