OpenTimelineIO CMX3600 EDL Adapter

The cmx_3600 adapter is part of OpenTimelineIO's core adapter plugins.
It provides reading and writing of CMX3600 formatted Edit Decision Lists (EDL). For more information on the CMX3600 format please check the links in the reference section

Adapter Feature Matrix

The following features of OTIO are supported by the cmx_3600 adapter:

Feature	Support
Single Track of Clips	✔
Multiple Video Tracks	✖
Audio Tracks & Clips	✔
Gap/Filler	✔
Markers	✔
Nesting	✖
Transitions	✔
Audio/Video Effects	✖
Linear Speed Effects	✔
Fancy Speed Effects	✖
Color Decision List	✔
Image Sequence Reference	✔

Style Variations

The cmx_3600 adapter supports writing EDL's with slight variations required by certain applications. At the moment the supported styles are:

• avid = Avid Media Composer (default)
• nucoda = Nucoda
• premiere = Adobe Premiere Pro

Main Functions

The two main functions below are usually called indirectly through otio.adapters.read_from_[file|string] and otio.adapters.write_to_[file|string]. However, since the cmx_3600 adapter provides some additional arguments we should mention them here.

read_from_string(input_str, rate=24, ignore_timecode_mismatch=False)

Reads a CMX Edit Decision List (EDL) from a string.
Since EDLs don't contain metadata specifying the rate they are meant for, you may need to specify the rate parameter (default is 24).
By default, read_from_string will throw an exception if it discovers invalid timecode in the EDL. For example, if a clip's record timecode overlaps with the previous cut.
Since this is a common mistake in many EDLs, you can specify ignore_timecode_mismatch=True, which will supress these errors and attempt to guess at the correct record timecode based on the source timecode and adjacent cuts.
For best results, you may wish to do something like this:

try:
    timeline = otio.adapters.read_from_string("mymovie.edl", rate=30)
except EDLParseError:
   print('Log a warning here')
   try:
       timeline = otio.adapters.read_from_string(
           "mymovie.edl",
           rate=30,
           ignore_timecode_mismatch=True)
   except EDLParseError:
       print('Log an error here')

write_to_string(input_otio, rate=None, style='avid', reelname_len=8)

Writes a CMX Edit Decision List (EDL) to a string.
This function introduces style and reelname_len parameters.
The style parameter let's you produce slight variations of EDL's (avid by default). Other supported styles are "nucoda" and "premiere".
The reelname_len parameter lets you determine how many characters are in the reel name of the EDL (default is 8). Setting it to None will not set a limit of characters.

EDL References

• Full specification: SMPTE 258M-2004 "For Television −− Transfer of Edit Decision Lists" (See also this older document)
• Reference

License

OpenTimelineIO and the "cmx_3600" adapter are open source software. Please see the LICENSE for details.

Nothing in the license file or this project grants any right to use Pixar or any other contributor’s trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names.

Contributions

If you want to contribute to the project, please see: https://opentimelineio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/contributing.html
Please also read up on testing your code in the "getting started" section of the OpenTimelineIO plugin template repository.

Contact

For more information, please visit http://opentimeline.io/ or https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenTimelineIO or join our discussion forum: https://lists.aswf.io/g/otio-discussion