EDLs do not have enough characters for RED?

[Eugene Lehnert]

I have been conforming a RED job on the Smoke using a RED Rocket card to Debayer the DPX files. It seems that the EDL does not carry enough characters to carry the full tape name. Has anyone encountered this? Does anyone have a work around?

[Steven]

EDLs typically do not carry more characters than they were originally designed to hold back in the old days 🙂 However all the new digital camera formats have enlarged tape names.

You did not state where the EDL came from but you could try to export an AAF or EDL and relink the media to the smoke timeline through tape name and timecode.

Another way I have seen is that the EDL could be exported with the extra tape names at the bottom of the EDL. Once again I am not sure which of the off-line apps can do this. You would than run the EDL through an Autodesk python script to correctly state the tape names per entry. A bit long winded but I have seen it work.

As I mentioned, now days people are using XML and AAF to get around the EDL limitations.

Hope this helps.

Regards
Grant

[Merrill DataSiteF]

Grant-

Thanks for posting. Final Cut Pro was used for the offline. I have tried exporting XMLs from Final Cut into the Smoke I can’t get the dpx sequences to connect at all in the Smoke that way. For some reason an EDL is the only way I get the Smoke to connect to the sequences I am making out of the RED Rocket.

Thanks,

Eugene

[Merrill DataSiteF]

I’m also working on a 2010 Smoke.

[Steven]

Hi,

Things have certainly changed a lot since going to 2011.

From what I remember in 2010, you could get the time-codes to relink to an XML clip by manually formatting the metadata. Normally the issue lies in the fact that you would normally offline at a low resolution and conform at a higher resolution. Importing in the XML and reformatting it to to the correct settings can all be done through the tools menu. This is required because the XML remembers everything including resolution from FCP which would not be what you need when doing the high resolution conform. If the resolution of the timeline does not match the resolution of the DPXs it will not relink…. subsequently fixed in 2011 with soft resizing etc….

The EDL only knows tape name and timecode. So its resolution is derived from the project. So if your project is the same resolution as your DPX, than it solves the reformatting issues. However the tape name issue ala EDLs still exit and there is no easy solution if the metadata was not exported into the EDL in the first place.

You need to look into the EDL from FCP and see if somewhere it puts the full length filenames. I suspect that FCPs export might truncate it but I stand corrected since it has been a while since I used EDLs for this type of work.

I know it might not help you too much but hopefully it might ignite some ideas in you to get around the issue.

Regards
Grant

[Merrill DataSiteF]

I seem to remember doing this before. I am going to try and offline the empty XML and then try re-linking the dpx files.

[Merrill DataSiteF]

Reformat to the format you need and then consolidate the video! Or vice versa I guess? But it’s working and it’s glorious. Very happy. The Red Rocket card is great. Woo hoo!

Thanks y’all.

Eugene

[Author]

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