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EDL to file conform
I need to get a sequence out of Media Composer and into Color. I’m assuming a stop in Final Cut land will be necessary, but I could be wrong there.
I know someone is going to tell me Automatic Duck, and that’s honestly probably the best way to go, but this is a no budget so I’d rather spend an afternoon on the conform than drop $500 on the sensible way.
The plan is to make a CMX 3600 with clip names included. I’m tracking all source media names in Avid as well as what card it came from, so finding my source media (EX1) for the final conform won’t be hard. I’ll use log and transfer to import the camera media for the used clips into FCP, check reel names, and then reconnect to the EDL.
Sound is handled in protools, so I’m not concerned about it whatsoever.
I’ve done a small test of this so far and everything links as it should. The only problem is that final cut wants EVERYTHING to match when I reconnect media, so it yells at me for the start and end times not matching the QT file I’m linking to. I understand the reason for this message, but in this case I would have trouble caring less. Beyond getting this message once, I get it EVERY TIME. I say every time because there is apparently no way to batch reconnect to imperfect matches. I can’t find any way to suppress the error or override it in a way that will allow me to connect to more than one file at a time.
Does anyone have any idea how to get around this (aside from marking my footage in log&transfer to the correct lengths which would be worse)? Worse things could happen, but this is a very annoying oversight (even worse than not having an “apply all” setting for setting scratch disks and autosave locations)
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2 Replies
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Micah
Automatic Duck! (There, I said it!)
FCP’s EDL capabilities were designed for capturing tapes from a VTR to make a master, so any other usage is just gonna take too much time to get right.
If your media composer can work with high or full resolution images, I would just export a TIFF Image sequence out of Media composer, convert it to a FCP Quicktime (on the FCP computer), and do your grading that way. set up your Media Composer timeline to start at zero, make the first frame of the movie start there (no fade up), do the export, then print an edl so you can easily find the cut points when you go to Color it.
hope this helps
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
Well, someone did have to say it didn’t they?
The last thing I worked on I did something kind of like that. I exported a proresHQ quicktime with an EDL and used the EDL to make a cutlist from the QT like it was a piece of tape and I was doing a tape to tape correction. It worked okay, but the transitions go a little chewed up, and something in the export process left everything washed out and a bit green (it wasn’t a 709/RGB mixup either, I checked that. I think some codecs just don’t cross convert well). I did a 30 second spot the way I’m suggesting and it looked much better (and graded much easier because I wasn’t constantly cleaning up after the conversion)
Basically I’d like to stay as close to my camera media as possible in terms of quality. I know you don’t lose that much quality with digital, but it is compressed, it’s 8bit color, and comes from a GOP based codec, so I’d like to hang on to any image quality I had to begin with and not be recompressing it too many times.
I’m working on two different projects this way, the first I’m offlining in DNxHD36, so directly exporting that for finishing let alone grading wouldn’t be a good idea, the other one I stayed in XDcam, so it’s still sort of first generation and so I could likely get away with doing that one cutlist style.
Would it be possible to make a macro to accept all my errors and continue re-connecting until everything is online?
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