Hi, as all of you AAF importers know, the file names are often just jibberish from Premiere etc and the original file name ends up in Nuendos “descripton” category. But this category is not searchable within Nuendo, unless I’ve missed something?
Would be quite handy if it was.
Hi Alex, yes not searchable in the pool but you can scan the folder in the media bay and in there you can use the desciption attritube view and also the search filter to search that way.
Hi, yeah thats a workaround I guess, thx.
A workaround yes, but a useless one.
I find myself working on an animated project with an AAF from Premiere. All of the character dialogue is just split across 2 tracks. I want each character on their own track.
All the file names are useless gibberish, but the character names do exist in the description field.
I should be able to search the description field of all the clips for the character names, select all the relevant clips together at once and move them all to a different track / set of tracks as a group.
In fact, I just tried to search via Mediabay and the description info I can see on the clip in N14 does not even appear in Mediabay
You might have the wrong description field in the mediabay possibly? All attributes should show up and you can customise wich one you see I believe. Maybe it was set to BWF description and not just description. Also you can configure a PLE to do what you want by selecting all character names events on a track and then moving them down to another track. Might want to dig into PLE for that kind of tasks if not already.
I would search the forum for a way to do this using the Project Logical Editor.
Off the top of my head you can set it up to search and target events by name, so if your one character has a gibberish name you should be able to copy-paste that into your PLE preset and trigger it to target only those events.
What I don’t remember though is how the heck to actually select targeted events. I know how to change their names etc., and I know how to move selected events, but I don’t know how to select the targeted events.
I think if you could figure out how to select targeted events you should be good.
Also I stand corrected @KMT333 you are right there doesnt’ seem to be a way of viewing the description field in the media bay I was almost certain given how many attribute properties are searchable. This is odd and I feel like it should be there if its part of the metadata from the file. (maybe its under a different name?)
However yes PLE may be able to help you select names that contain certain characters etc. You can maybe set the Event Name Attribute 1 to description in Event display (preferences) for your events and then run a PLE to select all the names that contain those character’s name. I can help you make one if needed.
Do you know if there’s a way to select events once they have been targeted (through filtering)? I don’t know how to do that.
I think I saw another user write that they chose “Select” under “Actions”, but I can’t find that command.
yeah so what I do for convinience is select all of the events I want to run the search on first - otherwise it usually selects everything in the project without filtering. There might be a tidier way to do it but here what one of mine looks like by modifying one of the presets
That’s actually backwards. You’re filtering by selecting all events (i.e. filtering out non-selected events) and I was looking for a way to select events that had already been filtered.
If the other poster could easily select only the desired events with the weird names then none of this would be a problem for them because they could just nudge by track to new tracks (or cut/paste). So the act of selecting specific tracks based on names is the problem.
OP said the character names exist in the description attribute. So my suggestion was to set the event attribute display to that and then use the above PLE to select them and then move them to another track etc. Might be backwards for your request yes. I’d have to think about that specific case. Slowly getting my bearings and using PLE more but not an expert yet by any means
What do you mean by events that have already been filtered? how do you know if they are filtered if they are not selected? are you referring to seaching with the pool maybe or mediabay? curious.
The act of “selecting” the way you are using the word is effectively “filtering”.
The first section in the PLE editor is for filtering. In other words, as far as I understand it, that section allows you to narrow the “things” you want “actions” to apply to. It doesn’t actually do anything to anything, just filters according to your settings so that you can limit what you are actually applying functions on. If you use Condition: “Property is Set” and parameter “is Selected” it means that you are only filtering ‘in’ everything that is already selected.
The next section is where you do things to the items that are left after filtering.
In order to move the events of a certain character/actor they have to be selected on the timeline. Selecting events is an action. It is different from filtering. So the steps would be:
“1” would be in “Filtering”,
“2” would be in “Actions”, and
“3” would be done in the “Post-Process Commands” section in the lower right.
The way you have your filtering all events remain selected.
Yeah copy that good info. I think most of that is clear. Im used to doing that because i want to narrow down my selections to already selected events as sometimes the names are also on other events in the timeline as well on other tracks. Maybe i can filter to be more track specific if that works? For this case yeah likely cumbersome and not the most defined way as mention not likely tidiest way. Though it should get the job done if character names are in the description attribute.. At least works for what i need it to do. Will look at refining it.
Ok, so the best partial “solution/workaround” I can figure out actually misses using the “description” as a filter criteria. But I might as well put this in this thread for now is just in case:
On the timeline I have some events with “NAME” in the name field.
Then after applying the above PLE:
It is then easy to manually select the moved events and then move them to a different track, and you could create another PLE that takes all selected events (that you just moved) and automatically subtracts the same amount to bring it back to the correct place on the timeline which should be easier than trying to match the relative start time manually when copying the first time.
Like I said, if the desired attribute is a name that’s actually in the description field then this is only half of the job, and in addition to that it would be better if we could just “select” the filtered events.
I forgot the option to select is at the bottom of the PLE.
yep exactly I was going to say that in theory it should select all the events with “name” when using the command at the bottom with your version.
My method is sort of an extra filter when I want to select a group of events that are already selected and then have it select those target events with the “name” only.
It would be killer if PLE can also move them to a designated track. Maybe with Post commands.
I don’t think that’s a problem once the selection is made. Simply issue a “cut” or “copy” command and then navigate to the target track (or not if you already have it selected) and past. Unless I’m missing something.
Still trying to understand how to get “description” field to be a filter parameter.
Thanks gents, silly me, I totally forgot about the PLE! It’s nearly perfect!
Yes, it does select all the events with the names only in the description field that I want, so that bit is great!
I can then drag all those events to another set of tracks (as they are not on a single track) and move them to a single track by just selecting one relevant clip, selecting all on track, nudging the clips up or down a track, selecting all on track again and repeat until all the relevant clips are on a single track.
Now it would be nice if there was a way to move all events to a single track with a single command. Sometimes AAF’s get really wide with lots of characters so this would save buckets of time.
Its a beast - I’ve been trying to get a better hold of its function lately. Think we should start some kind of sharing forum for different script ideas to share with each other.
