Thanks For reply Spot

Question For Sony

SO I will not be able to edit with 16mm 35mm 8mm Film Digi beta using Vegas Now or In the Forseeable Future ?

I don't remember the precise details but I don't think the problem is actually editing the problem is in the matchback. As far as I know the Avid system that SPOT mentioned is the one and only system that can do it. I seem to recall the issue is to do with film frame rates being slightly different.
I know the Sony engineers did explain this in some more detail some time ago.
One possble workaround is to have the transfer include burnt in frame numbers and match back from them rather than the EDL but I think you'll still face a possible audio sync issue.
One solution might be to do a rough cut in say Vegas then go to a real film editing system and edit a workprint and match back from that the traditional way. Sadly an aweful lot of the gear for doing that became scrap metal when TV stations ditched film for ENG. I think I know someone with a box full of syncronisers if you want one. Oh and I've got two portable field viewers for 16mm that could be got working.

Bob.

WOW Thanks Bob Thats extremely Generous Of you ! Ideally I want to edit Film in Vegas though...

Yes Avid does it So does Final Cut Pro Basicly the Lab sends you back A DV Which you can edit then return the EDL AND They will do a Neg Cut for you...

The only thing about editing film in Vegas or any NLE is you just don't get the same smell.
You can return an EDL out of Vegas too but I think you'll find there'll be a problem with the matchback. Do a search, I know this has come up before.

Bob.

Bob

Yes I know Vegas CREATES an EDL... I did'nt think it would be to Difficult To turn it into a Usable One for The Lab to use...

The Vegas EDL really has no relation to real world film matchback edls. Could it modified to do so? Sure if someone wanted to write a program for it. There are other systems out there that offer matchback as an option - as I have said in my past posts on the subject (so those who have heard this before tune out now) we used an Austrailian company that developed this system when it first came into play. They came over and set up shop in North Hollywood and sent out flyers to local production companies. I am pretty sure we gave them their first feature to cut. At the time the concept of time code to EDL to negative cut seemed out there...but you know what? The bloody Aussies did it! What we did was shoot the film and have the lab telecine the dailies with a window burn and edge numbers. We brought that into a D/Vision and would cut away and hand over a VHS work print of each reel along with an EDL. What they would have done already was to, more or less, take the first frame of picture TC and first frame of picture edge number and than scan through to the end of the camera roll and jot down the last frame of pictures TC and edge number. They would manually do this for each roll of film - ID it with the tape number and let this new fangled software spit out the numbers. When they got my EDL they would feed those numbers into the software and out would pop the neg cutting/conform list.

Now D/Vision came with a DOS based program - I think with vV 2.1 but not sure - it was sort of "Here, use this at your own will" type of thing. It sort of did the same thing but was a real hit and miss pain to use. But another little DOS thing it also came with was helpful because it would pop back any overlaps - based on what film size you said. So like for 35mm it needed 3 frames as a safety - if your cut was duplicated or overlapped it would flag them and tell you.

So if someone could write a UI that allowed access to the Vegas inner working as it relates to time code that allowed the user to enter in a first and last frame film edge number than convert the pulldown verses DF or NDF TC...any takers? Thus far there hasn't been.

I'm not that good a programmer to takle this but it certainly sounds doable. Obviously the SDK that's available via a NDA gives you all the hooks to read the .veg file. Things might be a bit simpler than what they used to be too, with a 24pA transfer you could avoid the DF/NDF issue completely and get a better 'feel' for how the thing will look anyway.
But if you have the edge number burnt into each frame why not bypass the NLE entirely? These should be readable using OCR. Given that VD or AVISynth already has the framework for decoding DV this shouldn't be too hard for one of the gurus working with those tools.
Now the other issue would be handling opticals but this too could be gotten around by exporting the A and B rolls as separate AVIs to produce a separate A and B roll cutting list. These could be merged as needed. Sorry my knowledge of the process pegs out here as the only time I've done this was with a grease pencil on the workprint. I don't know how a film EDL defines opticals.

Bob.

The OCR concept - what happened to that? I was very exicted many years ago when Quicktime announced that, in conjunction with Premiere, one could do EDL's and film match back lists via window burn. The problme was it was onl;y doable on a MAC. "Quicktime for WIndows" did not have OCR. Now it still doesn't, and I have no idea if the MAC verison still does or not. I really never heard too much about that after the first year it was announced. I think I can remember there being issues with it because of compression - you needed to be working with uncompressed data for it to really work as advertised and at the time most systems could not really keep up with uncompressed data, why most stuff was still being done offline and an EDL being taken to an Online house.

As for the opticals - yeah, A/B EDL's is how it was done - it worked fine, however keep in mind most labs charged more for dissolves because it did require a A/B negative. I miss the days of marking film with a grease pencil - yeah, really I do. :) Something about actually handling film and putting it on a splicing block. *sigh*

Filmy,
it was the smell man, the smell of the stuff. Bromine and isopropanol and whatever was in that glue. Now most of the
film cans I open just smell of vinegar!

Bob.

IT Would be really Great :) If Someone could make a Usable Script !

The challenge, here, is that film cutting uses Keycode for time info, not video SMPTE TImecode.

Keycode, which is burned into the edge of the film as a bar code, provides a unique time signature from reel to reel of film as well as emulsion and batch information.

When one wishes to cut film within the video domain, one should receive a telecined video of the film master with timecode and keycode burned into the picture. As I remember, Keycode can also be recorded to the telecine video tape for retrieval by systems (like Avid) that know how to read it. It's possible the Keycode is stored in the SMPTE user-bits. I don't remember. It's also possible to use an OCR plugin to recognize and generate usable Keycode info.

Once you have cut your picture in the video domain, your Timecode EDL has to be conformed back to the Keycode cuts so the film lab may cut the film.