Dialogue Editing

The Edit Decision List 67
of the Avid session or the videotape to make sure you’ve done nothing stupid
with the timecode.
The Switcher setting in the Standards section concerns the protocol with
which the editor controller communicates with the video switcher (“vision
mixer”). You needn’t bother with this. Do, however, set Audio Channels to 4.
The oh-so-exciting option of 16 channels isn’t valid for CMX3600 EDLs.
Record Start Time is set to Sequence and left alone. Don’t mess with this one
unless you’re prepared to offset all of your regions once the new sessions are
conformed.
Pulldown Start Frame has to do with the correlation between the video color
framing sequence and the 4-frame 2 : 3 : 2 telecine pulldown sequence. Normally
default to Sequence, which uses the parameters embedded in the original
list. Good news for PAL editors—this isn’t your problem!
Tapename Truncation controls how overlong tape (source) names are shortened
into CMX3600 legal names. The choices are obvious.
Finally, the big moment: Optimization. This determines how events will be
modifi ed in the new EDL and therefore how your auto-assembly will interpret
transitions like dissolves, wipes, and, most important, audio dissolves.
You’re not interested in keeping the picture editor’s transitions—besides,
the OMF gives you a perfect reference of what the editor was up to when he
made them. Why muddy up the EDL with all these unnecessary dissolve
commands? Check all of the options except Include Black Edits, which is
unnecessary.
Click Apply and you’ll see the cleaned EDL in the EDL Manager window.
Save it into an appropriately named folder, using a hierarchy something like
this:
Lost in Jordan (fi lm title)/
EDLs (all EDL fi les)/
EDLs postcleaning (as opposed to raw EDLs or print-ready EDLs)/
Repeat for each EDL. Remember, there’ll be a lot of EDLs per reel. Each reel
could easily have three or four audio EDLs and a video EDL, so on a 6-A/
B-reel fi lm you may have 30 EDLs per “layer” (raw EDLs, postclean, printready,
etc.). It pays to be obsessively organized.
Optimizing an edit list does more than enforce the changes you’ve chosen.
An EDL cleaning program will format the list in a manner acceptable to
most auto-assembly utilities. Some picture workstations generate EDLs not