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Export EDL for audio timings (assistant editor tricks)
Hi there,
I’m hoping someone has a sure fire method to making this mundane Assistant editor job easier.
I work in TV, with show typical 47mn run-time, with LOTS OF AUDIO!!
I have to submit out audio to the relevant Australian Authorities to pay for royalties etc and need to time the music.
I’m looking for a way to export an EDL that could be read in say Microsoft Excel where I could have all the track names used and find the total amount in time. It’s probably;y possible and maybe someone has either some software or a manual way of doing this?
Cheers,
Ben
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6 Replies
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An edl is basically a text file (but with .edl on the end of the file name), so it can be opened in a word processing program.
So what you need to do is when you make an edl, select only the music track(s) and enable the comments to show the clip names. Then when you look at the edl, for each event the two 8 digit numbers on the right are the in and out timecodes for your timeline (so you can calculate the duration) and the comments line will have the clip name (which ought to be the track name).
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Thanks Andrew, I’ve found a great tool that could potentially save a lot of time.
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/SoundCount
It uses XML instead of EDL. After testing I’ve found the timings to be a little inaccurate but this might be user error in my part.
I’ll investigate further
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Whilst an EDL will show what music events were in the timeline, that may or may not bare any relationship to the music as mixed in the final audio project.
By all means, use an EDL to identify file names, but you should actually do a timing on the final mixed audio file as in many cases music may be licensed in blocks of 30 or 15 seconds so it makes a big difference if the music ran 32 seconds in the EDL but 29 in the mix.
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Yes you’re right hoping someOne has come up with a method to find the exact timing of the tracks. I think everyone here knows what I’m trying to do. I understand what an EDl and XML is, just looking for a good workflow.
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Michael has a very valid point. Sometimes the music can be on a fee per programme or a buy-out, but the “per 30sec” arrangement is still the most common.
I do this task in one of two ways – either I time all the music events on the timeline myself, or I give a DVD/Quicktime and an EDL to someone else to do the timings. I don’t normally rely on just the EDL (plus, sometimes the music timings change in the sound dub, so although the track names are valid the durations on an EDL can be misleading).
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Thanks for the responses so far, it seems that I’m stuck with a manual method for now.
After a bit of searching I found this software that uses the XML format to approximate the values. Unfortunately i found discrepancies with the results, have emailed the developer for possible causes on my end.
https://www.spherico.de/filmtools/SoundCount/
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