Final Cut Pro’s bad EDL
By S Simmons. Filed in Editing |
I recently edited a music video for Kenny Rogers. Pretty straight forward stuff. It was a performance base which will get effects done after it is online and conformed. There were several EDL glitches. 3 instances in the cut when the FCP EDL generated the wrong timecode. There was a time, early in the FCP life, when EDL generation was questionable. In those early versions I would painstakingly check each edit in the cut with the even in the generated EDL. Time consuming but necessary. I think it was around version 3 that things got better and generally I have never had problems until this one. And that’s EDLs pulled from :30 second spots, 4 minute music videos and 90 minute features. So I was quite sad to see this happen with 2 lists on this Kenny Rogers job.
I will use event #6 to illustrate. It is a clip with a 15 frame fade from black. If you don’t know how to read an EDL then take a look here. First I pulled the list:
Again, this is only event #6 out of 110. Not a huge EDL. So I get a call from the facility of 3 out of sync shots. They send over an EDL of the 3 bad shots (after eye-balling from a reference copy and finding the correct ones):
Hmmm… that is indeed the same as the list I sent over. So I go to 01.00.12.27 in the timeline and I see:
The beginning of a performance shot with a dissolve. But looking at the source clip timecode I see this:
Ahhh ha! The source timecode should be 01.04.01.29 but what was pulled in the list was 01.04.26.27. But why? This is a question that I don’t know the answer to. Upon looking at the other out of sync shots it was the same. Wherever the dissolves appeared, FCP pulled the incorrect numbers in the EDL.
I think of this post as a word of warning… In the early days of Final Cut Pro (as well as any new non-linear editing app) I never trusted an EDL. I would always painstakingly check the list to make sure it pulled the correct shots. And for the most part, it did. As the years passed and the program matured, I checked them less closely as they were becoming very reliable. But then this. What I have learned now, even after years of pulling FCP EDLs, is that I will always check them very closely.
