-
Efficient Logging
I’m trying to find a way to help my producer log tapes more efficiently. We’re heading into a marathon couple of weeks. Her current workflow is to use Movie Maker, (or Shaker, or something PC) on her laptop to drive a miniDV camcorder that has dubs of the field tapes with window-burned TC. She hand-writes the timecodes into her script and then assembles an Excel document that is exported as a tab-delimited file and imported into FCP as a Batch List. It works, but it’s inconvenient for her to type timecode in Excel, since it doesn’t know about frames.
She has a copy of MediaLog. Is there any benefit to this? Does anyone know if I can take the tab-delimited text file MediaLog generates, do a little tweaking to keep the columns I want, rename the column headers, and import it as a Batch List into FCP?
I don’t have Automatic Duck, but for this project, I’m willing to get it.
Has anyone tried this? Does anyone have a better way of getting logs from a PC-operatin’ producer into FCP?
What we’re trying to avoid is either me typing her hand-written logs into FCP, or her typing timecode into Excel and having to type colons and semi-colons so I can end up with a Batch List to import. Neither is a time-conserving measure.
I’m open to any suggestions. There’s a checkbook around here somewhere if I need to purchase anything to make this more efficient.
As always, thanks!
debe
-
6 Replies
-
Check out CatDV. catdv.com will get you there. The 5.0 free beta trial works for PC and Macs. You can export a log list to premier, avid, fcp, etc.
It will also load in small thumbnail qt movies onto the laptop. I’ve worked with a producer with this and it was great. She was screening shots while I was editing and finessing the previous shot.
It was nice that she had the little thumbnails on the laptop. Instead of her just saying… “hmm see what take 2 looks like” she could actually look at a small qt of take 2 on her laptop while I kept working.
-
sebsky tools is a freeware program to facilitate getting Avid bins into FCP.
-
That’s true. If she can capture TC with MediaLog, she can convert to fcp batch lists with Sebsky Tools. ALE to FCP.
-
Sebsky’s is exactly what we need! I can’t believe I didn’t think about this a LOT sooner!
She’s been faxing me hand-written logs for years. The Excel spreadsheet is usually a disaster, because she omits too much info, and it’s usually faster for me to key it back in than it is to wrestle with making the Excel document work.
This way, she can send me an ALE, and all will be well…if she remembers to change the tape name, that is!
Thanks, guys!
debe
************ -
Just make sure she sets up her bin the way sebsky wants it or else you’ll have problems with it. In the help file it tells you what it is looking for.
-
Yep, thanks for the reminder, Scott. She’s going to use the “Statistics” bin view. That seems to make Sebsky’s happy!
Thanks everyone! As always, great info here on the COW!
debe
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up