EDL & Video AAF in Avid – Best Practices for Offline to Online Workflow

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Nacho,

Yes, there is a real art form to getting the right EDL.

EDL in its purest form is just In/Out Time-codes for the source, and the Master.
It will also carry the “Tape number” or the digital file name.
But it will not have much information for the effects, except the basic one.
If it involves multiple complex video layers, you might consider doing an additional EDL for each video track.

AAF can contain a lot more information, but that only works if the sender (you) can include it in the pack, and the people receiving it can “unpack” it.

You must ask questions of the production or post production facility that will do the “on-line” (final full quality) Master.

They should be able to tell you what they want.

And, although you might feel that would send a signal of not knowing, I can tell you that it is not as there are a thousand+ ways of messing up the auto-conform for your masterpiece of an off-line edit.

If anything, the facility will appreciate you asking, rather than them finding out the hard way.

When asking, you might even find that they are using AVID, and can open your project, without you doing a lot of unnecessary work.

Hope that this helps?

Atb
Mads

[Nacho Santana]

Hello Mads,

Thank you very much for your kind response and detailed explanation. I’m currently working in an office as an assistant editor, where, unfortunately, some people tend to be very private about their work and often unwilling to help or what I actually believe, unsure of the answers. Working with EDLs has been challenging for me at first, making things quite difficult. However, I’ve found that it becomes easier once you get the hang of it and is actually dead simple.

I’ve done a lot of editing in the past, mostly in-house with a team, so haven’t had the practice of sending work online.

Thanks!

[Glenn Sakatch]

I woild just send the aaf from the timeline as is. There is no need to strip any effects off per say. If there is an effect they don’t have, it will come up on their end as an “unknown effect”, which will force them to find out (from the reference movie with tc burn you are also sending) what is happening at that section. The underlying clip will still be there.

As for an edl, i don’t use them too much anymore. There are lots of new templates that will allow way more audio and video tracks than what we used to be limited to, but same thing, i would just send an edl. Pretty sure when it encounters something it doesn’t understand, it will just move through to the next item.

One key would be to ensure you commit any multicam edits before making your lists. If you use multicam, and you don’t do this, the list will be trash on the other end.

[Nacho Santana]

Thanks Glenn! Really helpful, duly noted.