Throwing in towel on NLEs – Going back to CMX 3600

[Chris Kenny]

[Oliver Peters] “You can laugh all you want about this, but the most friendly data interchange format is the EDL, largely because it’s so “dumb”. That’s what most DI houses want. It’s what a lot of color correction systems want. Moving actual effects metadata around between competing systems is flawed in almost every instance and only works partially at best. That’s why most post houses recommend that you offline and online using the same platform. Interchange boils down to knowing where the clips are and where the edit points are. Forget everything else. You’ll have to rebuild it anyway. So, ironically, this four decades old standard is perfect for a file-based world. Good that someone put this utility together.”

Yeah, there’s quite a lot of appeal to a format that can represent a sequence in a format that software understands, but that’s simple enough to be human-readable and manually editable. We routinely use XML between FCP/Resolve these days because it preserves things like punch-ins, but whenever things start going wrong, it’s useful to have EDL as a fallback.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Jason Porthouse]

Oliver, I totally agree. EDLs have saved my bacon on a number of occasions, and anything that helps X to play nicely with the outside world is to be applauded. Sometimes simple is best.

Still want a T-bar though.

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Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*