Any basic advice on exporting an OMF?

[Nick Meyers]

first things first: talk to your sound people, ask what they want

clock leader on the head, a sync mark on the tail,
and pips on all tracks head and tail.

i prefer to export a frame of tone to make a “hard copy”. if you leave the tone generator in the timeline,
once you add handles head and tail, it ads up to a lot of excess audio you don’t need in your OMF.

separate dialogue, narration, sound effects and music onto different sets of tracks.

remember: muted clip do NOT appear in the OMF, so if you have alternative takes laid up, un-mute them, and lower their level instead.

nick

[Mark Spano]

First rule of OMF in FCP7: do NOT export OMF from FCP7!
Find a (free) copy of Automatic Duck for FCP7 (FCP Export). Use this to export an AAF. There are nasty bugs in OMF exports from FCP7 that were never fixed. AAF export from Automatic Duck is solid.

[Nick Meyers]

i don’t know what you are talking about, MArk.

OMFs from FCP have been consistently solid for me for years.

Michael Gissing, a very experienced sound mixer on this forum, has told me that FCP’s OMFs were more reliable than those from other apps.

nick

[Mark Spano]

Hi Nick,

If you have a project in 23.976p in FCP 7 and you export an OMF, the resulting OMF comes out in 24.0p. That’s bad!
The only solution to fail-proof audio exporting from FCP 7 is AAF through Automatic Duck.

[Michael Gissing]

I have Automatic Duck but still use OMF as it is utterly reliable for me going into Fairlight.

Yes a 23.98 sequence into Fairlight sets the sequence to 24. So after import I just change it to 23.976 and it is all in sync. I have just done two feature docos in the past three months with that frame rate and that is the simple fix for the only bug I have come across in OMFs from FCP7. If Noam is using that frame rate then he may wish to consider finding Automatic Duck but really he should be asking his sound post people what they want.