Assemble EDL to protools

I'll butt in here as a Basehead user who wears the dialogue editor hat most of the time and is also very familiar with pretty much all the current options for dialogue-related workflows.

Personally I think that it'd be misguided for Basehead to chase any EDL wrangling and other assembly features because it just has never been a product intended for that, and with the current options available out there, it'd be a tall order, too. Leave that to Kraken, EdiLoad, and MatchBox.

Searching dialogue bits via a transcription text search, however, is a natural extension to a product that is already designed to search audio via various metrics (very flexibly) and spot it into a DAW... I put in a feature request for this -- two or three years back, it's in the request base somewhere -- it didn't gain traction at the time. Absentia DX process with Basehead (which I actually brought to ToddAO's attention originally as that's the process I ended up using two years ago) relies on having to embed metadata into existing files, which is not only much more lengthy process but also something that isn't generally desirable and is nearly always best to avoid. IF it was possible to import marker/region info into Basehead from a spreadsheet (I don't THINK it is, is it?), then one could perhaps import the spreadsheet generated by Absentia transcription into Basehead, thus avoiding having to embed new metadata and keeping the original media fully intact. But it'd still be some overhead wrangling it. Imagine instead just hitting "transcribe" on a group or an import or a database in BH and having that data generated directly...

Absentia's own alts finder would be good IF it allowed any sort of filtering of the results so they could be narrowed down better. As it stands, it is only good for finding EXACT alts but not part-word cheats and the like, because you cannot narrow the search down to a single person/character in any way; neither by metadata (channel name) nor by a string in a pathname.

Kraken at this time indeed is THE most flexible solution for this, but for this alone, I personally don't believe it is worth the price of admission. And the moment any of the (well-known and few :)) major audio library apps add this feature, Kraken will DEFINITELY lose its sheen. It'll still have the matchback functionality (realtime sync to what's selected in the DAW, showing all alt takes) -- but that is not where the real time saving is and is very minor, IMO.

@Steve T I really hope at some point you folks can re-consider implementing this feature into BH. Perhaps only to rub it in to your main competitor, who does have it coming? If not for any other reason? 🙂

Tall order is an understatement.  That is a Venti order!

I bet! 

What is the problem with Absentia writing metadata into the file?  Are they not preserving existing metadata and blowing it out which is totally no bueno?  or is the time it takes?

They do preserve metadata (have a setting for it actually) but the process changes the timestamp (obviously) and -- for less obvious reason -- file size. But even if it didn't -- it is wrong on principle/conceptually to modify the original production audio in any way. It is the only point of true reference left in the process. There are only rare extreme cases where original production roll media NEEDs to be modified in any way -- like fixing some catastrophic timecode errors, and even that now can generally be handled without it.

Funny enough, just today Absentia released an update to their Alts Finder which implements a filter by both the channel/character name AND a pathname search, so that's  significant functionality improvement. I have yet to test it out. If it works, they only need to add exact string matching (for now will only match multiple words in any order unless I am not aware of some hidden syntx options) and an option to ignore punctuation (or not)...

Yeah the Dialog workflow is all about referencing original files

Thank you 🙂 Indeed!

Maybe they could write a tiny file next to it called [filename].cue that copies the CUE Markers they write into that

But they do that already -- they write an .xls. That's the other option in Absentia that doesn't write to the files as mentioned in my first post above. Absentia can either generate a SINGLE .xls per each file transcribed -- which lives where the production file lives -- OR they generate a single "project" .xls per the whole transcription job. So the data is already there...

BTW, this is also the Kraken approach: they generate two hidden files per each production file scanned, in the same location: one for the log and one for the actual transcription text.

Personally I like individual .cue files approach less because of the doubling or tripling file descriptors in the file system. And again it's adding something to the original dataset that wasn't there before, and why do that when you can have a single database (in whatever format) elsewhere?

In one hour we could make basehead 2024 look for that file and read and write to it instead of CUE chunk in the original file

Well, how about implementing a cue region/ marker import feature (user-triggered) -- all the info is in that project.xls file already: file names, cue start and end timestamps, transcription text... This is what I was asking about in my first post -- cue/marker region import. And this way it wouldn't have to be Absentia-specific, either -- just follows a certain syntax like any other text import...

And this would only have to be read-only, too -- nothing needed to write? One-time import, no?

Still, if the transcription was built-in, it'd be so much nicer. I get it that it's a whole other proposition in terms of implementation effort and licensing costs for those third-party engines (have no idea what they cost) BUT it then also would instantly make Basehead a lot more attractive proposition as a standalone Dialogue editor's helper tool. Huge value compared to the competition -- in my opinion. Of course I myself have options and access to any and all of these but I also would GREATLY prefer not to have to go anywhere but BH for all such needs.