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EDL export to EXCEL and database managment
Dear sirs and ladies,
I have over a hundred tapes to which I must cut together VNR’s and build a searchable media library. The tapes are all over the place so I intend to export useful clips to archive tapes.
I have worked out that I can put my useful clips into a sequence having adjusted their “comments 1” with “date, keyword, keyword, keyword” i.e. “12/05/05, southampton, gipsy, moth, Jane, austin, sailing”.
I can export this EDL with the archive tape number, clip name, keywords to an cmx3600 EDL . And I can export the tape to miniDV. I then have my information in a text file I can for an excel spreadsheet or a database.
My problem now is the EDL format is a text file. I am interested in the third and fourth time code, and the data from lines “FROM CLIP NAME” AND “COMMENT”. I need to somehow plug this information into excel or a database. As you know an EDL is made up of lines with spaces and is messy.
Does anyone know where I go now? Am I missing something obvious from my workflow? Is their an easier way to do this?
Help!
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10 Replies
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Tell the EDL to open with Excel. This should trigger the import wizard. Say that your data is delimited (seperated by a certain character) and check that “space” is the character.
This should set your timecodes in the same columns, and you can delete the columns you don’t want.
If you know someone with text parsing knowledge of PERL or similar language, you could export XML and have them write a dandy little parser to give you what you want.
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Off course… thankyou… this is a manual way and it will work. I am bad on excel.
I have the issue now that any words in my export EDL now take up individual fields. I can change the clip name to “Cowes_week” instead of “cowes week” so it goes into one nice field. I can make my comments fields as comma seperated with no spaces “girl,boat,wind” and that should go into one field. I am stuck though with the computer generated ones like “Bars and Tone” I suppose I can change them as well.
I suppose your right, a little program to intelligently find my fields would have to be designed by PERL or something. I just wonder, this problem must be age old in the world of editing.. taking an EDL and making it into a USABLE excel speadsheet without having to spend hours cutting and pasting fields later. I wonder if there is anything out there?
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Another way to use the import wizard in Excel is to tell it each field takes up a certain number of characters.
Since I believe an EDL is always an 80 character line of text, this approach should get your fields in the right column.
You can turn your cut into a batch list by selecting all the clips in the cut, and dragging them to a bin, then exporting a batch list. However, this doesn’t give you their timecode location in the cut sequence. I’ll have to ponder this for a while….
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Thomas
been where you been, and i just gotta say that i found trying to get an edl to do more than be an edl was always disspointing. Even putting the various FCP bin comment fields as notes in the edl did nothing (i could never get them to parse as one entry, as it was a separate carriage return.
My advice would be to look into a video database program, and for you being across the pond CatDV might be the way to go. these programs have special import capbilities so even though the “comment” is on a separate line, they can read it as if it was in its own column.
here is a link to another program which may be what you are looking for:
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/XML2Text/index.html
hope this helps
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
Thankyou Bob, your probably right. I am currently manually going through hundreds of entries as Steve says. It works but it ain’t great.
I am SO surprised that there is no easy way to turn an EDL into a batch import as this would be the easiest way. Say we had a finished project and its EDL, if I wanted to RE digitise that finished project clip by clip from its finished version with each clip as a seperate batch.
http://www.thomasenglish.co.uk
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Thomas
Here is the deal: you really don’t need EDL’s. The way FCP treats the whole, clip, subclip, source file relationship you CAN batch redigitize from a timeline. AND you don’t have to redigitize everything.
you can take a timeline, and using media manger, make a new project using only the sections of media you need to recreate the timeline. You can copy just what you need, plus some “handles” OR you can create a new set of empty clips that have just what you need plus handles, and recapture those!
Look up in the manual about clips and there various relationships, and look up media manager.
and look at what Larry Jordan and Ken Stone (google em!) have to say about media manager.with a little research, you too can “Just Say No” to EDLs
hope this helps
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
Thanks Bob, essentially that is my plan and workflow.
I have an hour off rubbish footage intermingled with a few lovely shots.
I extract the shots one by one and lay them together in the timeline.
I media manage export a copy of that timeline into a new project. It splits all these clips into seperate clips.
In my new project I rename each of these clips and in comments I put in the keywords. I then media manage export this timeline AGAIN (this is so I have the new clip names on the medias clips).
In my new project timeline I export an EDL and export the timeline to tape.
I then reprocess manually my EDL into a spreadsheet so that I can easily batch digitize any chosen clip back into any NLE. The spreadsheet can be searched using FIND or put into a database.
I also have all the clips in a folder nicely labelled up to tally with my spreadsheet.
Phew… its gonna be a lot of work.
[url=”https://www.thomasenglish.co.uk”]www.thomasenglish.co.uk[/url]
[url=”https://www.studio.pplmedia.com”]PPL Media[/url] -
Thomas
your plan sound good
HOWEVER
that link to the Spherico web site i posted earlier might be worth looking into
the program call XML2TXT would take care of your edl-excel-batch list step. The developer made it specifically so he could layoff a bunch of shots to a tape to keep or use again, AND have a bin that refered to that layoff tape.
If you can spare the dough, it sounds like it would save you time. I have tried it and it works.
Larry jordan wrote a review, you can fine it on larryjordanbiz.com
good luck, dont get carpal tunnel, and hope this helps
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
Another option is to use expressions and convert the EDL into a HTML document using tools such as Powershell and FFmpeg:
https://www.videoproductionslondon.com/blog/edl-to-html-with-thumbnails
Then is just a matter of uploading the HTML to a CMS for easier asset management. And you can even use the headframes or scene changes of the EDL to create chapter navigation links to a low res file of the EDL sequence for previewing.
Chris McCoy
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