What a PITA. So far in all of the edls vegas only recognizes the source media as one file instead of the 5 or 6 different raw files.

I spent 5+K for a FCP system and Avid and now have to learn the damn things because vegas can't even import a simple cuts dissolves edit.....

Sure, it can. So long as you're importing one made in Vegas.

From Vegas' online help:

"Vegas EDLs are not the same as those used in traditional linear editing suites and are not intended as a project interchange for other editing applications."

Rob

Which is retarded. Why would you want a vegas edl when you can have a .veg?

I can think of a some reasons -- most of which involve exporting an EDL, using something other than another NLE to make some changes, and re-importing the new EDL. For example, I've done some fine tuning and duplication of events / settings in Excel that would've been more tedious and time-consuming in Vegas.

Perhaps what Sony should do is rename their "EDL." I think it does serve a purpose, just not the one people expect it to given it using an industry-standard name but not industry standard methods.

Rob

EDIT: Hmm, you might want to ignore this message. I assumed EDL export, not import.

1- Bruceo, does the following work? :
Go to Tools --> Scripting --> Export EDL

The EDL exported vaguely looks like a normal EDL.

The spacing and other formatting looks a little different from other EDLs.

I haven't tried this route myself, but it seems vaguely like it's what you're looking for.

2- Watch out for reel naming. You might want to name your reels 5/7/8 characters or less. The EDL won't hold more than 8 characters for the reel name! And I haven't checked to see if it implements brolls (dissolving from a reel to itself; in linear editing, you need to copy footage onto another reel for this to happen).

I don't see an obvious method in Vegas to rename a bunch of reels. :(

3- The file --> save as --> EDL is silly in my opinion and should really be clarified as something like... "Vegas Project List". Or just remove it, because no one seems to use it??

4- The EDLMax website has some info on EDLs.
http://www.edlmax.com/maxguide.html

Their product might help too.

5- If EDL support is important to you, you might want to put in some product suggestions (and I think the Vegas team does listen, i.e. how snapping is in V7).

6- Personally, I've never seen project interchange work very well in ANY product.

EDLs (which are decades old) may still be the best method, although even they have flaws. Multiple EDL formats, reels named "BREEL" (not "TAPE1B" or something more informative), frame rate and drop/non-drop confusion, etc.

AAF is supposed to solve things. FCP doesn't support it without Automatic Duck.

Why don't you use AAF for project exchange between Vegas and Avid?

Marco

I've imported Vegas edl's into Avid. It can be done (sort of) but is a PITA. The Export EDL script is the place to start but it will only work with one track each of video and audio. Cuts only! If you have mulitiple layers, you must prep each layer separately in it's own Vegas timeline. (I said it was a PITA!) It's a long route and may not be frame accurate. Tell the Avid to add handles - you may have to slip and slide. --- The edl is a text doc with a .edl extention and gets imported into Avid ala CMX900. First you must do a search/replace in the edl document changing ; to : (semi-colon to colon) so Avid understands the timecode. --- I sure wish Sony (or some 3rd party) would accomodate the very professional necessity of edl exchange.

Has anyone used AAF exchange successfully? I'd like to hear about it. Total bust every time I've tried...

I wonder how many making comments here have bothered to read the long ago posts by Filmy and to a lesser extent myself?
I wonder how many here realise that you cannot transfer even a Vegas project between Vegas systems?
I wonder how many users are lulled into a false sense of security believing that all they need to restore a project is the tapes and a Vegas project?

OK, just to save you the difficulty of searching:

Vegas projects do not reference tape TC, they reference a time into the FILE, not the tape. Do you see a problem, a very, very serious problem?
With the VidCap capture file you can restore those files, without it all hope is lost. The problem isn't a missing "feature", it's by design.
And for the record this has been gone over many, many times since at least V4. No progress has been made in any release, not even a hint that the issue might be addressed.

Bob.

farss: I wonder how many making comments here have bothered to read the long ago posts by Filmy and to a lesser extent myself? (etc. etc.)

Gets my vote for the most condescending entry in the thread. Thank you.

My apologies, I didn't intend it to be taken that way but I can certainly see how it reads that way.
This is a very frustrating issue though. Several old timers have spent a significant amount of time trying to deal with this very issue.
And I've made the same mistake. I didn't very carefully read what someone else had said in a very detailed explaination and went off thinking I was smarter and would crack the problem. Probably wasted a good few days writing code and in the end I finally grasped the problem.

Again my apologies.

Bob.

Hi, while we aren't exchanging edl's with FCP or Avid we certainly are exchanging vegas files with FAIRLIGHT, a sound mixing system that is used in lots of pro sound studios locally. We have been exporting both vegas edl's and AAF's very successfully. Whilst we would love to do our sound mixes in house, our clients (TVC producers) like finishing their sound in a suite that has accoustics and speakers set up professionally, with an experienced sound engineer controlling. We prep the session on Vegas with as many tracks as we want, export the AAF or EDL to a file and send it over. They love that it is all frame accurate, named, and ready for them to add their finishing touches.
It appears the trend is towards AAF/MXF i/o these days - not EDL's (I could be wrong though.)
This is a very sticky question re cross platform compatibility when this field is soooooo competitive.

Could I write a program that does it? And by it I mean transfer a Vegas EDL to an Avid EDL correctly. Unless the Vegas EDL's are inheritably missing vital data, I'm sure I could do it.

When you capture a tape Vidcap stores the in/out points in its own file.
You then put that file onto the T/L in Vegas.
Vegas's project file stores the in/out points as a time offset from the start of that file. This has many advantages. It makes handling mixed media simple, audio, video, stills, anything and at any frame rate, they can all go onto the T/L and with a lot of number crunching at any point on the T/L Vegas can workout what frame/sample to play / render.

But here's the problem.
Take those files and a Vegas type EDL into another system and all will be well, it too can cope with how Vegas does things. It might take a bit of coding but you only have to read/write text files. I've done it in VBA, not rocket science.
But go back to the original tapes and you have a problem. What was on the Vegas T/L at 10 seconds might have come from the tape at 1minute 39 seconds and Vegas stores nothing that'll tell you that. You're stumped, no data available to translate from.
Now if you could read the VidCap file I suspect you've got a chance. Except it's a binary file and I've never been able to crack it open.
Of course that's assuming you've still got that file with those tapes logs in them.
There is some hope, perhaps on the horizon. Vegas's internal capture app (the one used for SDI/HDV capture) reads/writes a pretty simple XML text file. I got halfway through coding something to write a batch capture file for SDI capture but another speed hump that had nothing to do with the EDL issue got in the way. However even if it's got to work not much use unless you're working with SDI or HDV.

Hope this helps explain the issue.

Bob.

Bob, if you ever get around to writing the XML - EDL converter I'd love to get my hands on it. We work near-on exclusively in SDI (plus lots of .avi or .mov's generated from CG).

We currently have to be really vigilante about saving the correct VidCap (XML) as well as the .veg. But this doesn't help when we want to give our edit to another house.

What are you doing working on Sunday anyway? (It least that's what it is here on my side of the world.

Seems like you're another Australian, I keep finding more and more Vegemites!

Well in my case what I was trying to do was the other way around, convert a CMX EDL into the SDI Capture widget so I could capture via SDI to a HDD. Should be an easy enough task for any programmer, it's all text files. Jonathan Neal seems pretty keen and young :)

Why am I working Sundays.
Hm, finished off fixing audio for someones HSC arts project.
Capturing HDV and DVCAM tapes from last nights shoot, have to convert HDV to 16:9 SD to prep for edit. Then need to fathom out how to recover fritzed audio file for Edirol R-4, Edirol tech (who work weekends, nice guys, buy their gear) reckon CHKDSK will fix it.

Bob. (In Sydney, which seems to be burning at the moment)

Ian = In Melbourne - just turned the heater back on after two weeks of warm weather........ maybe the worlds weather is going crazy after all.

Seems a lot of posters are not doing the search I suggested and just asking the same ole, same ole. So I echo what Bob has said but also toss in a few other things here.

First - EDL's were multi format. In other words some people think that Vegas is really only wanting to deal with Vegas because there are so many other NLE's out there it would be hard to keep up. This is fair enough as there were also other flavors of EDL's...however one could take an EDL and use it on a 1 inch system, a beta SP system, An Avid NLE, an D/Vision NLE or other systems. The common factor was the EDL - not the system.

Now we do have many flavors of NLE's. And I have said this many many times - the line between offline and online is a blur anymore. One can really "offline" a project and have the NLE dump out a master. In the past I might offline with VHS or 3/4 and than take the EDL to an online house and master from D1 or Beta. WIth D/Vision I would ingest at "VHS quality" along with TC from a VHS dub and than do two things - both involving an EDL - take the CMX EDL to the negative cutter where they would conform the negative based on the EDL (matchback). The other is take the EDL to an online house where they would conform the beta masters of the telecine. But lets be fair - SoFo and Sony have maintained that Vegas is not an "online" NLE since Vegas 3 (I think) so it really does not need EDL support. Early sell sheets only said it had EDL support...this changed over time as people came to find that EDL support was not really EDL support as the industry knew it.

Ok - now the timecode issue. Early on I found that files captured in one program might not work with Vegas. So you could capture with Premiere from, say, Betacam and do an "offline rez" version with smaller files - time code intact - that would read perfectly in Premiere. However in Vegas bringing those same files, no matter if they were the full rez or low rez versions, would show timecode all with a start time of zero. And likewise if one captured with Vegas any sort of attempt at a low rez version zapped the timecode. Taking a Vegas captured file into another NLE would also show timecode info as zero start time. Thusly my joke was that what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas. So now enter SCLive - after people requested Vegas Video support one could capture DV and have the timecode read in Vegas as well as other NLE's. Dude! Sweet! But again - do a low rez offline version and all bets were off. Take the low rez file and Premiere could do a recapture but Vegas could not. Through all of this however Vegas still offered "limited EDL support".

Go back to what I said in my reply above. Provided all the captured media and extra media is in the same folder as the EDL than it might work. For me that is all fine and dandy but really it defeats the whole concept of an EDL in maintaing things like reel numbers and timecode. As has been pointed out what if you need to recapture at another time? And has also been "counter pointed out" - why would you need to recapture when all you have to do is save it all on a hard drive. Well for me one the helpful things would be the ability to email an EDL over to someone who has, say, another NLE and have them open it up and be able to work on the project. Now this could be audio, it could be video. I do not expect every person to be using Vegas or Premiere Pro. And as for low rez/hi rez even this is now blurring because faster computers and cheap hard drives mean that you don't always have to work with a low rez file.

I guess the bottom line is really that people need to know what Vegas can do and can not do and if it fits their projects before they invest in it. That goes for *any* system though. Vegas does not do online. Vegas does not do matchback. If you need that sort of thing Vegas is not for you. Vegas is not the best at NLE project interchange...yes it can be done but a lot of times it takes tweaking.

I have said this to Bob in another thread and if someone does a search they will find this in detail but if someone can write a progam that will ingest a Vegas EDL, which has more than enough info in it, and remap to a workable EDL it would be great. There are a few programs that tried to fix the EDL issues, such as the Vegas EDL Import Plug-in for After Effects, but that too is limited by the Vegas handling of EDL's. On the audio side Cui Bono makes a program that seems to work pretty well - but it is only for audio. AAF seems hopeful as a modern equal to the EDL but there seems to be a lack of "terms" to fully work. In other words one NLE might export a project with terms such as "master Video in" "master Video out" and another might simply say "Source in" and "Source out".

At times this is all a huge CF when it comes to EDL's and Vegas.

I think I've mentioned this before but just in case.

I have had much success getting a CMX EDL from PPro into Vegas, done three projects this way. But the source material was stills, many hundreds of them. What was a real challenge was the files as sent to me were in totally different folders to where the EDL specified them.

But what I did have was TC on the T/L and duration and file name. As these were stills, T/C in/out from tape was irrelevant. Wrote a slab of code that did a search for the files and if that failed spun off into a file browser dialogue for human interevntion. Needless to say there was the odd file they'd failed to send me.

Once I had all the needed data in an Access table some more VBA code wrote out a Vegas project file that Vegas loaded, job done. No transitions were involved (thankfully).

I've been able to use the same slabs of code to create .sub files as well for DVDA etc.

You can do quite a lot in limited circumstances if you're prepared to get your hands dirty. Must say it impressed some of the old hands, seeing me fudge an EDL like that.

The other testing part was converting the CMX EDL's T/C into Vegas's time format. Thankfully this was all PAL, please don't anyone ask me to do this for NTSC DF TC.

Bob.

Say Bob could you make this script in NTSC drop frame please?

:)

I have figured out how to get Premier into Vegas as well (as we had talked about in old threads) however it takes manual interaction to get it to work. I would never want to waste a clients time by doing it this way however. And it would be a nightmare doing it on a feature, or even a fast cut music video or short for that matter.

Not being able to interchange a simple cut and dissolve edit really sucks.

I can't see cutting a project in FCP or Avid near as fast as I can in Vegas, but everyone I am hiring out of school or experienced that is good are FCP or Avid. I wish I could do all the work myself, but it is just not possible....

Especially in the case of Premiere and most AVIDs, video project interchange is best done with AAF rather than EDLs.

Audio-only projects can also be moved via AAF, or, if the other host doesn't support AAF, EDL Convert Pro or Fairlight make tools that will write project files or OMFs.

EDL Export (CMX 3600) from Vegas can be done via the "Export EDL" script. CMX 3600 EDL import into Vegas is no longer being maintained- please use AAF if you need to move a video project INTO Vegas.