exporting OMF

[Shane Ross]

OMF export doesn’t recognize IN and OUT marks. It tries to export everything in your sequence. If you want to only export that section, duplicate the sequence, then delete everything you DON’T want to export.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Tamas Erdosi]

– What version of FCP are you using?
– The drive where you want to export the OMF file isn’t FAT-32?

My experience with OMF export that in/out points are ignored when you export OMF.FCP exports the whole sequence.

Tamas Erdosi / http://www.tamaserdosi.eu

[Michael Gissing]

[Tamas Erdosi] “The drive where you want to export the OMF file isn’t FAT-32?”

OMF has its own 2 gig file limit, regardless of the drive format. You can thank AVID for thinking like Microsoft on that one.

And yes it doesn’t recognise In Out marks unfortunately so follow Shane’s advice.

[Baz Leffler]

[Shane Ross] “duplicate the sequence, then delete everything you DON’T want to export.”

What I do is just disable the second half of the tracks and export an OMF and then re-enable the second half and disable the first half and export a ‘B side’ OMF.

The last project I did I had to break it down to quarters (if you get my drift).

Baz

What would I do without the ‘UNDO’ button!!!!

[Michael Gissing]

Actual Baz, us sound post people don’t like that way of splitting a project. If the first OMF is say tracks 1-4 and the second one is tracks 5-8, the second OMF moves the audio to tracks 1-4 so when you import both into the timeline, you have a mess with the second import sitting on top of the first.

It is better to split along the timeline for another reason. You can load the first OMF and start tracklaying, without waiting for the second OMF. This matters on fast turnaround where the OMF’s are being downloaded via ftp.

[Baz Leffler]

Good point Michael but I guess its all to do with tools and workflow.

I never go to audio post until the show I am working on is locked off.

And my technique works perfectly with my audio suite which runs Neundo 4. The second OMF imports perfectly into position alongside its matching OMF’s

Baz

What would I do without the ‘UNDO’ button!!!!

[Shane Ross]

And when you do break it up, make sure that you have a 2-pop (white frame and TONE) for one frame at the head of the show…typically at 59:58:00. And have this on ALL parts of the sequence that you break up if you do this. So that audio has a way to line up the separate OMF’s you provide them.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Ben Scott]

surely you could do the trick of using clip enable to turn off sections of the timeline instead of in/out points

FCP will not export OMF of clips which are not enabled

I think the all track selection tool could come in handy here

I had the same issue with 2gb file limit when exporting 24bit clips

also interested how the omf would deal with a sequence set to 16bit when clips are captured from sound devices kit at 24bit, also does the metadata get passed at all to OMF e.g. BWAV timecode and reel number?

suppose that is another thing left to check before exporting out to OMF, getting the sequence set to the correct bit depth as well as the OMF export setting

whats annoying is that the import into soundtrack pro of OMF is not at all useful for checking it has worked, soundtrack doesnt seem to read the timecode of the sequence and takes ages if at all to actually import, omf export from soundtrack isnt worth it at all though (its broken)

[Arthur Lunn]

Thanks everyone for the great advices. This confirmed my initial suspicions that the in/out was not recognized when trying to export audio.

I figured out a trick to export OMF in chunks. I opened a temporary timeline (new project) and copied and pasted to it until I had the 10 minute I needed, then I exported to OMF and closed project without saving and that worked.

Again thanks!