The Mozart Project — Avid to Adobe Premiere Pro, reconstructed

The problem everyone has accepted

Editorial cuts in Avid. The promo team cuts in Premiere Pro. VFX works in After Effects. Every time one of them needs the current sequence, the answer is the same: export an AAF.

The cuts come across. Almost nothing else does.

Multicam groups flatten to whatever angle happened to be selected. Speed ramps are approximated, baked, or missing. Effects arrive as offline placeholders. Colour work is gone. Markers land partially, or in the wrong places. Track locks and disabled tracks are forgotten. The logging metadata your sound crew maintained across a whole shoot — scene, take, tape ID, which microphone was on which channel — is not in the file.

So an assistant spends a week rebuilding by hand what already existed. On a series, that's weeks. And it's never quite the same, because nobody reconstructs ten thousand small decisions from memory.

This is not a flaw in anyone's AAF exporter. AAF is a general-purpose interchange format, built to carry a common denominator between many systems, and it does that honestly. It was never designed to carry one application's work into another without loss. Structurally, it cannot.

No AAF. Native bins in, a native Premiere Pro project out.

What arrives

Everything the interchange leaves behind.

Structure: Bins, master clips, subclips, sequences, full track layout
Editorial: Every cut at its exact frame, transitions and dissolves
Multicam: Groups, all angles, and the selected angle at every individual cut
Speed: Constant changes, keyframed ramps, and reverse motion
Effects: Colour and LUTs, chroma key, picture-in-picture, reframing, masks, mattes, flips
Layers: Avid track-level effects rebuilt as Premiere Pro adjustment layers
Titles: Still editable — text, fonts, colour, shadow, outline
Audio: Clip gain, keyframed automation, fades, multi-channel routing, AudioSuite processing
Subtitles: Avid SubCap rebuilt as a native Premiere Pro caption track, correct timecode, layers preserved
Markers: All five scopes — sequence, clip, track, master clip, subclip — with colours and comments
Paperwork: Scene, take, tape ID, reel names, shoot date, per-channel names
State: Track locks and disabled tracks, preserved as such
Format: Mixed frame rates and mixed rasters conformed correctly

Avid’s native .avb bins are read directly; a real .prproj is written.

Your media never moves

No need to reconnect.

The Mozart Project writes a project that links directly to your existing Avid media — the same MXF files, in the same Avid MediaFiles structure, exactly where they already sit. Open it and the picture is there.

Clips are matched to media by identity rather than filename, so linking is resolved before Premiere Pro ever opens the file.

No transcoding: Your Avid MXF media is used as-is
No second copy: Duplicating a show's media is a real cost. This avoids it entirely
No reorganising: The Avid MediaFiles structure stays exactly as Avid built it
Nothing is written: Your Avid project is only ever read. It stays open and valid

It also runs with no media attached at all. Bins alone produce a complete, correctly structured project, and it comes online when the drive does.

The project links to your Avid media exactly where it already lives.

The detail underneath

The parts that had to be rebuilt, not copied.

Below is what sits beneath a few of the rows in that table — chosen because they're what editors get burned by, not because they're the only ones that go this deep.

Groups that are still groups

An interchange export flattens a multicam group to the angle that happened to be selected. Not damaged — gone. The sync work is lost, and so is the ability to change an angle ever again. Premiere Pro models multicam differently from Avid, so the group is rebuilt rather than copied: every angle, every audio route, and the selected angle at every cut.

A ramp that lands on the right frame

Avid interpolates a speed ramp with Catmull-Rom. Premiere Pro's Time Remapping interpolates linearly, and won't let you change that — hand it Avid's control points and it draws straight lines where Avid drew a curve. The Mozart Project resamples the curve adaptively, evaluated by the library that reads the Avid format rather than by a reimplementation of our own.

35 frames → 0.1 Drift on a reference ramp, before and after

Layers that don't exist in the source

Avid has no adjustment layers. It applies effects to whole tracks through a structural container Premiere Pro has no equivalent for. The correct result can't be copied — it has to be recognised, understood, and synthesised as a Premiere Pro object with no counterpart in the original file.

Channels that remember their names

When a recordist logs track 3 as the boom and track 4 as a radio mic, that note is the difference between a mix that starts immediately and one that starts with guesswork. It's metadata, not picture. It survives only if something is built deliberately to carry it.

A tool like this does not fail by crashing. It fails by quietly omitting something.

A dropped track. A missing marker. A ramp a second and a half out. Nothing errors, nothing warns, and the loss is found days later by someone who now has to distrust the entire transfer.

So: preserve faithfully, never silently drop or merge, never auto-fix an ambiguity by guessing — and when something genuinely cannot be carried, say so out loud. A silent omission found during development is treated as a more serious defect than a crash, because a crash tells you it happened.

Who built it

Zimo Huang

A film and television editor of fifteen years, nominated for an Emmy in 2024 for single-camera picture editing on a Netflix series.

The Mozart Project exists because he hit this problem on his own show and found that the honest answer was a week of an assistant's time. What matters, what's worth preserving, what an editor notices missing at 2am — all of it comes from having cut professionally rather than inferring it.

Zimo Huang — film and television editor, fifteen years.

Access

Currently in alpha, with working editors on real projects.

macOS, Apple Silicon. If you need an Avid sequence in Premiere Pro — for promo, for VFX, for finishing — or you'd like to test it against something difficult, get in touch.

Request access

Or email access@themozartproject.org