The most frequently asked question I get is, "How did you get into the film industry?" I've decided to write a post on this very topic to discuss and help others who are trying to find their way. I'm in post production and so although a lot of the information here is specific to post, it does also apply to other departments.
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In Post Production EDLs are used to communicate the edit of a TV Show or a Film or indeed any sequence of shots in a text format allowing the receiver of the EDL to reconstruct the edit with the media at their end. They are simply text files, but have some strict formatting which makes them difficult to read and difficult to wrangle with excel for example.
XML files are also being used more and more in apple workflows, but with an Avid Media Composer workflow you are pretty reliant on an EDL workflow. For instance, I communicate with digital labs on a daily basis using EDLs to request specific frames to be sent to whichever VFX vendor is on the show. It's the most efficient way to say I want this frame to this frame from this clip on this day. The lab is then able to read the EDL in and the media should link up without too much trouble. You may be in a position where you have been sent an EDL and want to read it into an excel file so that each clip is on its own row. Your starting place is within excel itself, choose the option to read in a text file and choose spaces as your delimiter. The result might not be exactly what you want as it won't be a single row per edit but at least this gives you a place that you can easily delete unwanted rows. I will soon be launching an app for Mac OSX which will be your friend if you ever find yourself wondering how to open that EDL that editorial sent you. So, further to my last post about getting the Red Epic footage into AVID here are some tips on conforming your sequence from AVID into Da Vinci Resolve for final colour correction using original R3D files.
Over the past couple of weeks we've been playing around with various exports of different EDLs from AVID. The reason we are trying this is because it proved difficult to have AVID talk to Apple Color. Now, there are some tutorials out there for this workflow but I just couldn't get the media to relink in Apple Color and I really didn't want to start messing with importing into FCP somehow first etc. So we found out that Da Vinci Resolve in fact had no problems importing a CMX3600 EDL or an AVID AAF. With the AAF, Resolve will try and find the MXF files you've been using in AVID but will fall back to media that you have imported. So as long as you import your trimmed R3D files into Resolve before loading the AAF that's the way to go! Here is a point by point workflow:
So, it's been a while since I've written anything and since I spent a few hours this weekend figuring things out with the Red EPIC and AVID Media Composer I thought I'd share the workflow I used for dailies and for editorial.
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Michael |