After Effects EDL Import

After Effects EDL Import support by Joofa helps load a CMX 3600 EDL into AE CS 3 (AE 8.0+). AE EDL plugin support is currently limited to Mac, however, PC support will be added soon. Additionally, After Effects 7.0 support shall also be provided. The plugin is available as Mac Universal Binary so it should run on both PPC/Intel Macs.

The plugin can work with Quicktime files and Image Sequences of any known codec type. Download it at the link at the bottom of this page.

NOTE TO CS4 USERS: When I made the plugin there was only CS3 around and CS4 was not released, so the installer put the plugin bundle (AEEDL.plugin) in the directory "/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS3/Plug-ins/". If you want to use the plugin in CS4 you can install the plugin and it will create the CS3 plugins directory, and then you may copy the plugin bundle (AEEEDL.plugin) into the corresponding CS4 plugins directory. So you just move the plugin from the CS3 directory it created to the actual CS4 directory created by your installation of CS4 i.e., "/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS4/Plug-ins/". A future version of the installer will make it detect which version of CS is installed and do accordingly.

Once the plugin is installed you should see it listed in the AE supported formats in the File->Import dialog box, and AE import starts recognizing files of type/extension ".edl" as shown in the image below. EDLs can also be dragged and dropped on the Project window in After Effects.

The process is pretty seamless and the exact same process for loading any allowed file/footage type in AE.

The following image shows an example of creating a small timeline in Final Cut Pro and the corresponding exported EDL loaded in After Effects. A Quicktime movie of a live demonstration of this process is available here. A lower quality movie is available at YouTube at the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruDZ8c09KSA

After Effects and Final Cut Pro Timeline

Since the free download is a demo/evaluation plugin, there are some restrictions imposed on it:

    (a) NTSC/PAL sized footage
    (b) 5 cuts per EDL. However, there is no limit on the number of EDLs used. You may use as many EDLs as you like.

For the plugin to access the required footage there are two options:

    (a) Place the EDL in the same directory as the footage.
    (b) Use the "non-standard" "PATH" reserved tag that I introduced for easy managing of things by providing the directory where footage is located.

Note: The "PATH:" reserved word only defines the directory location of the footage(s). The plugin is able to grab the filename from either the reel name or the comments tags regarding the clip name embedded in the EDL, and you don't have to do any effort for it.

It should be possible to use the "PATH:" tag multiple times for footage at multiply distributed places, however, I have only tested it with defining it once (more like globally) as shown in a test edl that I have used:.

TITLE: SEQUENCE 1
FCM: DROP FRAME
PATH: Macintosh HD:Users:joofa:Documents:video

001 UNTITLED AA/V C        00:36:20:16 00:36:22:01 01:00:00:17 01:00:02:02
* FROM CLIP NAME: MJ
* COMMENT:

002 UNTITLED AA/V C        00:35:02:24 00:35:03:20 01:00:02:02 01:00:02:28
* FROM CLIP NAME: MJ
* COMMENT:

003 UNTITLED AA/V C        00:36:56:03 00:36:57:12 01:00:02:28 01:00:04:07
* FROM CLIP NAME: MJ
* COMMENT:

In case EDL consists of footages of different timecodes, then the compositor in the AfterEffects is setup using the information gathered from the first footage and the remaining footages are conformed to it. In a typical XML export from FCP extra information is embedded that helps decide what to do in such multi-timecode situations, however, EDL misses this information, as I understand it, so I came up with this rule. But this can be changed to a different desired option.

Thanks again for all your help and support.

Click here to download AE EDL Import Plugin (v. 0.6.2)    Available Now!

Joofa
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