I have an AAF created by EdiLoad with dummy wavefiles. (an AAF with Conform Reference Tracks for a proper Field Rekorder Workflow for ProTools).
These dummy wavefiles have a timecode and a sound roll information in their metadata. The same metadata is included in the original location sound files.
In the “Field Recorder Audio Import” Panel of Nuendo, there is no option to do the field recorder audio import process with the help of sound roll metadata.
There is no Scene / Take / Reel / Date Recorded … metadata in these AAF-mediafiles.
Am I right, that there is no chance to do a field recorder relink workflow in Nuendo with the help of sound roll metadata without metadata conversion? This is quite common in the ProTools world.
Another question for the Nuendo DialogEditors: How do you relink the audio (substitute mixdown channels from picture edit with boom & lav channels from the location sound recordings) for a whole movie? Are there some tricks or batch possibilities to do that?
We still prefer to use Titan to assemble the location sound files.
When mixing I use the Steinberg feature to grab a alternate mic.
No, Steinberg doesn’t handle sound roll.
As far as I know only Ediload can push sound roll to a AAF. In a regular AAF from media composer I don’t think there is any sound roll data
Adding to that, I was just working on getting Field Recorder to work coming from Avid AAF.
I have Scene/Take properly populated in Avid and in the original sound files. Getting the Take number would be sufficient for the Field Recorder to find the matching file.
But it appears that Nuendo (11) is not reading the scene/take metadata?? When I add the info line at the top and display Scene/Take it’s blank. It’s also blank in the meta data field in the Field Recorder Dialog.
Seems like that should be a trivial thing to decode from the AAF?
In the meantime I could work around that by changing the name of the video dailies to encode the scene/take number in the filename and then Nuendo can extract that from the filename. But that won’t always be possible. So would be nice to use the original meta data that exist.
It depends…
It works with BWAV but not MXF.
Most large editing setups (including ours) use a MXF exclusive workflow. However decoding the metadata from the AAF and MXF files are not the same as it works in regular BWAV files. I hope Steinberg finds a solution for this as well eventually.
So until then it’s either use third party software or figure out how to use the Field recorder audio import Metadata retrieval features. It’s not very difficult, but the shooting process itself can make it complex if multiple recorders and naming conventions have been used.
I did not find a way to copy the BWAV from Avid though. If I link with BWAV in Avid, upon AAF export it complains that AMA linked files cannot be exported. If I import them, it converts them to .MXF and we’re back to the metadata issue.
It does seem Steinberg has to crack the .MXF limitation somehow for this workflow to be smooth and as advertised. I just tried the same in ProTools and it’s two clicks, no hassle. That’s unfortunate…
@allklier NO it Doesn’t work if you have mxf at all in the chain as Avid MC does not push the metadata to the exported wav files anyway so don’t bother trying.
The only way to get it fully working within MC is to not use MXF at all and just have all sound files as linked bwav files. But you can’t do that if you have a nexis/isis based system. It requières mxf for the files.
I guess avid knows exactly how they handle the metadata on export, Steinberg has to reverse engineer it as far as I know. Same with all AAFs. It’s a standard with many things that can be done differently by manufacturers thus it’s almost not a standard at all. They all do it differently.
So this means I cannot assemble a nuendo project by say xml or edl with all field recorder(s) files? Uff, I was really hoping to make the switch to nuendo. And the find alternate take depends on original timecode as well, which doesn’t seem to always be there, sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t.
Sorry if I was unclear, but the answer to THAT question is no… sort of…
But you CAN assemble it using the AAF. But not using the ACTUAL metadata in the MXF files. However Steinberg did help us so we can still get it done.
If the NLE used does NOT use MXF files then the metadata matching works as expected without using metadata retrieval.
Metadata retrieval is the method to rebuild virtual metadata using the information in the file names and in the AAF description field.
So yes you CAN assemble a film using Field recorder. Audio import. But not using a xml or edl.
If you want to use EDLs you CAN use the reconform tool (but it’s not efficient and requires to much extra work imo) or you have to use some sort of third party software. Our standard solution for years have been using Titan. It is great if you learn how to use it well (threshold is relatively high though).
For this last feature I just decided to only use Field recorder audio import using the AAF export from the Avid MC dialog tracks as the reference. It worked great but has a few prerequisites.
Export the AAF with full length audio files (not just with handles).
Then you have to get to grips with how the metadata retrieval system works.
You can use scene, take, duration to match for example. This last time I used prefix In file name and duration.
Take can be tricky to match as the written take data may break the metadata retrieval if formatted in certain ways. So I tend to use duration instead.
Using it to find alternate takes is not working well enough yet so I resort to mediabay (you can use any third party search program instead if you prefer).
And, if you already have used EDiLoad to prep for PT in the past you should be able do the same with Nuendo but you would have to convert the exported PT project to Nuendo first.
Ediload grabs data from the EDLs, AAFs or XMLs and inserts them into standard dummy bwav audio files and exports as PT, then you should be able to use AATranslator to convert that to a Nuendo xml and import it and match data that way as well.
There are MANY paths to do this. None are yet super straightforward.
When the built in field tecorder setup is done and you have found the setup that works for your particular project then it’s a really good way to assemble the dialog edit.
And YES being able to assemble using a imported edl or xml would be VERY helpful as well. But as of yet it doesn’t exist within Nuendo itself.
Hi Mentos,
another tool for field recording assembling or conforming is EDLtranslate. I’m the developer of it and use it for all of my dialogue editing projects.
It’s based on metadata of the wavs and f.e. an EDL. But you can use also other source formats (your dummy audio files) to conform the field recordings.
It is an “one click feature” (okay, a little bit more clicks are required), I mean, it’s a very quick work around.
I get this is a very old post, but for anyone searching this forum I wanted to post the following. EdiLoad v5 now contains a new assembly window to assemble (conform) your location WAV files. EdiLoad no longer exports a conform reference track and no longer requires the Pro Tools field recorder workflow, it can export an assembly containing the clips for all location channels as a PTX file or AAF file, ready for dialogue editing.
So EdiLoad can now import the edit data from an AAF, XML or EDL and with the assembly window link each event to all channels of the location WAV files to export a PTX file that can link directly to mono or poly WAV files, or an AAF that can link to mono WAV files.
