EDL Madness

farss wrote on 1/10/2006, 2:49 AM
So OK, I'll accept all the excuses as to why Vegas unlike every other NLE on the planet has problems reading CMX EDLs, yes I've only too recently seen how problematic that can be between ANY two NLEs.
BUT, surely to goodness it should work if Vegas wrote the EDL and Vegas reads the EDL.
Here's what I've done:
Create a dead simple project, 4 video clips, plain cuts, one track, no audio even.
Save as EDL.
Open new project, open EDL.
Vegas says it cannot find clips in specified folder, immediate question here, What is the specified folder, CMX EDLs don't have that data but why isn't there a default somewhere in Option etc.
So, I select Specify a Replacement File, navigate to folder with clip and specify it.
Repeat for all four clips.
By now I should have the project back again but sadly no such luck. I have four totally empty events on the timeline and 4 clips in the media pool and absolutely no simple way to make the clips in the media pool into the events on the timeline.
Looking in Edit Details, yes I have the correct in/out points but no active take names and no path specified, I kind of thought I did that a few steps back.
Have I perhaps missed something, this seems such a trivial task.
Being able to specify a project from an EDL is the staple of this business, I remember watching this being done using 10MHz 8 bit minicomputers reading EDLs from paper tape that'd been punched in by hand and here we are decades later and it can't be made to happen?
Bob.

Comments

farss wrote on 1/10/2006, 6:03 AM
This just got wierder and it's way to late at night for things to get wierd.
Wrote some more horrid looking VB, I can read a CMX 3600 EDL and spit it out as a nice EDL that Vegas will read.
About 90% of the clips load correctly except for 10 of them.
Go into Edit Details and OK some parameters such as Active Take Name and Take Start are missing, no drama one would hope, enter the those few by hand and all should be well. Ha, Murphy strikes again, just no way they can be changed or entered. RClick the event on the T/L and Active Take Name is greyed out.
What gives here?
What's the point of having Edit Details if one cannot change the values?
Am I left without so much as a way to even manually enter the edit details and why do some lines from the EDL, even one generated from Vegas fail to load correclty?
How does one end up with what looks like a locked event on the T/L?

Bob.
filmy wrote on 1/11/2006, 7:29 AM
Are these just retorical questions Bob?

I sound like a broken record here but much of what you just did I already pointed out in our past talk about EDL's in Vegas ;)

Bob - more EDL testing

So you did write a script than? Any chance of sharing?
farss wrote on 1/11/2006, 2:20 PM
I was waiting for you to chime in!
Well there's more than one issue here, not the least being how one can endup with empty events on the T/L and why you cannot edit the Edit Details data to address the issue. That in itself is rather odd.

However it looks like I'm making some headway, just had to slow down a bit as the client wanted it yesterday and he's given up waiting but I'm still working on this but not with the same amount of urgency.


No, I'm not using scripts. Instead I'm using something I'm already familiary with , MS Access and VBA. With those ancient tools I can read any text based EDLs and get the data into a database. This gives a number of advantages, not least being able to easily massage the data, print reports etc.

One big problem I realised is that trying to build a project EDL is a nightmare and gets one nowehere even if it works (and I've done this in the past with CMX EDLs but they're only stills based projects). Instead what I'm focussing on is building a capture log file for the internal capture utility as I need to recapture via SDI. The required file is a pretty simple piece of XML, so far I've been able to write a file that looks like it should work, will test it in the next few days.

/edit/

One thing to look at is using Vegas's EDL rather than the EDL script, just do a 'Save As' to get it. Now that'll give you all the data, including time in and out of the events. EXCEPT the time is just that, time in milliseconds, not really a big drama and it is format independant.
This file will load into Excel very nicely too. One big issue though is I can save and open this file and STILL HAVE PROBLEMS, that's scary!

Bob.
db wrote on 1/11/2006, 8:18 PM
forget EDL .. use AAF ..
farss wrote on 1/11/2006, 8:41 PM
What a brilliant suggestion, do you think this will work when it will not even work when you have the Vegas file itself? You need both the .veg file and the capture log file to rebuild a project from scratch. If AAF provides that then you might be onto something but I think not.
Bob.