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Importing an ALE after it’s been edited in Excel
Hi all,
I’m trying to find a way to rename lots of clips in our Avid project without going line by line in the bin and doing it manually. I basically want to make the following transformation happen:
Clip0001.new.01 = A1001
Clip0002.new.01 = A1002
etcI hear this can be done by exporting an ALE of the clips in the bin, editing it in Excel using the “find and replace” function, and re-importing it to the bin, thus updating all the clips with their newly formatted names.
Of course I’ve tried that but nothing seems to happen when I re-import it. I’m assuming it might have something to do with working in Excel, but the file is stil .ALE so not sure where my misstep is.
Thanks for any help.
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2 Replies
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Select all the clips in your bin (the ones with .new.xx on them), then File–>Import. Click on Options, click the Shot Log tab, and click the box at the bottom that says “Merge events with known clips.” Hit OK. Select the ALE you revised and click Open. It will merge the name from the ALE with the name of your selected clips in the bin, removing the .new.xx.
I use this trick all the time to preview footage at the finder level and type comments into the ALE while the footage is transcoding in Avid (DSLR footage, primarily). When the transcode is finished I import the ALE and merge it with the clips and my comments field is automatically populated with everything I logged using finder and the preview function. Super useful.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
Michael H already answered how to merge. I use TextWrangler on OSX for search and replace. Excel can mess up the formatting at times preventing a re-import/merge.
Also note that a merge can be destructive as it is not a true merge function. It will replace any fields with metadata from the ALE, but will replace black if field is blank and there is something in that column already. Make sure the first time you export that it is every column you want to keep. Some columns are based on essence so cannot change or be deleted such as kHz, etc.
Michael
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