Remember not too long ago…well, TWO ENTRIES AGO… I told you that I had a some task that I needed an application to help with, so I e-mailed a developer I know and he said “Hey, look, I have what you want already…” remember that?

Well, I did it again.

We still rely on the old and ancient EDL technology to spit out lists and track footage use in our projects. Mainly stock footage that we need to order, or music cue sheets. So we output these EDLs, and we try to do as simply as we can, but they are still quite large and full of data that we don’t need and when you import them into Excel you need to do a lot of cleaning up. All of this takes time, and usually falls on the shoulders of an associate producer or clearance supervisor to deal with. This wasn’t the original intent of the EDLs…they were designed to be import into linear editing systems to assemble cuts that were done on offline systems.

So I got to thinking, MXLs are the new standard, and they contain a lot of information, and information WE NEED. So couldn’t someone devise an application that could read those XML files and give us just what we need? Cleanly? So I chatted with Phil Hodgetts of Intelligent Assistance and asked him if he could make something that does this. Because I have seen other products he made that utilizes data from XML files, so I figured it was right up his alley.

Turns out that he to has ALREADY MADE the product I was asking him to make. He released it not a few days before I inquired about it. Too funny.

So I downloaded the demo and tested it, and noticed that it seemed lacking in a lot of information that I needed. So I said “hey, can you add source timecode of the clips, and duration? We need to track the SOURCE footage used in a show.” Sure thing…the next day his partner Greg had made a few changes and viola! There they were. How’s THAT for listening to the client?

The product is called Sequence Clip Reporter and it is a part of their Assisted Editing series of applications. I cannot tell you how helpful this is…and how much of a time saver. It does a lot. The associate producer here is absolutely GIDDY about it, and can’t wait to buy it.

One thing I really like about this is that you can output a Video Only list that shows off ALL the layers, so no need for multiple EDLs, and audio only lists, and target only the audio you want.

And it only costs $69. Woot!