cinema tools audio edls

Hi there,
have come a cropper with the labs which I have just found out today and face a horrendous problem, I hope someone out there can help!
I am editing a film shot on 35mm 3 perf, sound recorded on a hard disk recorder and synced in the lab, which provided flx/ale files. What was asked for and what should have happened was the sync house to make sure that the media that they provided to the sound house should have had matching file names with what was sent to the offline. This never happened. So now when I try and run any kind of edl the time code is right but the file names dont come anywhere close (don't even have slate number another joyous mess that the lab never fixed for us despite numerous irate phone calls) the clip name instead just is the start timecode.
Even when I run an edl within cinema tools using a program file set up from a fcp edl and select that i want slate and take information included (that is the first column in the cinema tools database as per the flx that was supplied) it still only gives me clip name and timecode. Does anyone have any clue as to why it is not adding fields? Or another way round this short of doing a manual (shudder!) conform?
Thanks guys!
Kate

Hi Kate,

> I am editing a film shot on 35mm 3 perf, sound
> recorded on a hard disk recorder and synced in the
> lab, which provided flx/ale files. What was asked
> for and what should have happened was the sync
> house to make sure that the media that they
> provided to the sound house should have had
> matching file names with what was sent to the
> offline. This never happened.

This may sound strange, but did they log "tape numbers" for the audio? I know that it was recorded on a hard disk so there is no tape, but the EDL's used to conform audio uses the audio tape number and the timecode. The file names don't need to match.

> ...Even when I run an edl within cinema tools using a
> program file set up from a fcp edl...

Cinema Tools should find the corresponding audio tape number and timecode from this--provided it is in the database.

> ...it still only
> gives me clip name and timecode. Does anyone have
> any clue as to why it is not adding fields? Or
> another way round this short of doing a manual
> (shudder!) conform?

How are the audio files that were delivered to your sound editor named? There might be a date stamp on them and maybe the timecode that was run on the hard disk audio recorder was time of day timecode. There should be a way to convert the "shoot date" to an "audio tape" number. That might do the trick.

However, there is a very easy way around all this. If the quality of the sound transfer in telecine is good and you are using a digital video tape format, you are probably better off exporting an OMF from FCP and have your sound editor work with that. If the sound editor needs to find alternate takes or other pieces that are missing from your edit, he/she can look them up on the sound reports.

If the sound people insist on working with the 24-bit audio files from the hard disk recorder I'll let you in a a little secret. I'm working at a major studio and all of the dialogue is 16-bit. In fact, all of our sound effects are also 16-bits, only the music delivered by the composer is sometimes 24-bit.

--Dan

Hi Dan,
thanks for your help.
It turned out that the problem stemmed from the audio t/c being incorrectly entered by the lab into the ALE. They had created a third completely nonsensical code relating to neither audio or picture t/c. Unfortunately my sound editor only got the hard disk files last week so we only found out then that's what they had been doing.
I had a new set of ALE files set up by them which meant I could then export an audio edl through cinema tools via a new database with beta t/c that I sent via the lab who converted to audio timecode, also including the slate number. I am now sleeping again!
Omfs were no good (not because of 24bit, dolby is after all still only 16) because I had been given a two track mixdown of boom and radio, so the sound editor could not have isolated a track, often six were recorded.
Kate