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  • Avid EDL to Premier

    Posted by Rory Keenan on January 29, 2025 at 12:58 am

    Can a 20 year old Avid EDL be imported into Premier?

    A Director I work with wants to re-edit one of his old films.

    About 20 years ago, it was shot on film, transferred to Beta, then edited on Avid. He recently had the original film transferred to to digital. It’s a documentary, and has many hours of interviews and Broll.

    He would like to start with a reassemble of his original EDL (even if it comes together rough). That way he can see his old story (if we can start with a rough of the original sequence). Then re-edit to update the story.

    It’s OK if the timing on some of the edits is off, color-correction gone, etc. He just wants to avoid having to find all the old clips (the logging is gone) and recreating the original cut just by watching the film, and re logging all the footage.

    If we do this transfer into Premier, the film will be finished in Premier and live that way (not be transferred back to Avid). We will also consider bringing the old EDL into a modern Avid (instead of Premier). Our consideration is that neither of us has used Avid in a few years, so we’d have to get reacquainted.

    For now I’d just like to get an idea of how challenging it would be to import a 20year old Avid EDL into Premier and relink to media to the sequence.

    Mads Nybo jørgensen replied 2 weeks, 6 days ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • Mads Nybo jørgensen

    January 29, 2025 at 1:29 am

    Hey Rory,

    There is no such thing as an “old EDL”.
    But there are many flavours of “EDL”.

    If you open up the EDL in notepad or similar, then you might be able to read what type or version it is. Which will be helpful for looking up formats supported by PPro.

    The short answer should be: Yes, you should be able to import the EDL.
    The bigger problem is whether you have a VTR with timecode and SDI capture to your PPro system?
    And, if the new transfer was done to the same time-code and frame-rate?
    If not, the original EDL is more less useless, except for you and director to look at in paper form whilst doing the re-edit.

    However, fear not, as you can always use “Scene Edit Detection” to find and create edit points across your old master in the PPro timeline.

    And the same for the re-scanned files.

    That is one way of easily be able to re-arrange clips.

    Although, was the audio “glued” on in the new film-scan, or is that on a separate media?

    Hope this helps get you started.

    Atb
    Mads

    PS: I have just did week installed AVID MC and PPro on my new system – if you are stuck, I’m happy to run a test for you.

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