Care to share your OMF knowledge?

[fab]

I'd like to poll you guys on your real life experience with exchanging sessions between Logic and PT via OMF.

I definitely leaving Logic behind now, but I have many sessions I still need to carry over, and quite a few projetcs still showing up in that format.
Priting all tracks from zero is not an option anymore. Two time consuming.

What do you need on the PT side for an HD rig?
Did you get it to work, from Logic to ProTools?

Any gruesome limitations?

Thanks.

Fab

[bigbadhenchman]

Well, I've been going PT's to Nurndo and back again. No problems. just make sure you have a 2 pop on every track. Just in case.

[scottgreiner]

I've not done it with Logic, but DP works OK with only occasional annoyances, like having to locate the files again (which DP sucks at). What IS annoying is that Digi (Avid) developed the OMF standard, and charge extra for it, while everyone else includes it for free. This will probably get deleted, as it does each time I complain about it.

[aux]

Personally, I use OMF(I) a lot for post work, but also have experience with transferring from Logic to PT. The OMF support on the Logic side has been dramatically improved over the last year. The first versions that had the import function, never worked properly. Tracks not being transferred, files disappeared etc. By chance, I did some transferring this week without any problems. What is still a bit annoying, is that you can not choose to import stereo files to a stereo track in PT, but it still creates 2 mono tracks. I haven't tried it with AAF files, but OMF 2 does not do this.

It needs some improvement, like anything...

[Chief Technician]

What IS annoying is that Digi (Avid) developed the OMF standard


It's time to dispel this myth. OMFI is not a standard. OMFI was created by Avid using something Apple created called Bento to make it possible. Apple didn't want to make Bento as public as it would have had to be for SMPTE, AES, etc. to adopt OMFI as a standard. Granted, OMFI has been widely adopted, but no organization ordained it a standard. Also, OMFI was developed by Avid (1992 or so) before Avid bought Digidesign (1995 I believe). You can read more about this (including what I don't remember about Bento) in one of the Fall 2002 MIX issues.

[scottgreiner]

Standard/no standard...whatever. Avid flopped it out there, everyone includes it for free but Digi/Avid. No big deal, just slightly annoying.

[N-G-NEER]

Gentleman The OMF or OMFI was developed by a now defunked company called Opcode who was very big in MIDI. In fact it was one of thier bigest accomplishments. Opcode went bankrupt and thier assets were sold to Gibson who dropped the line shortly there after. the Opcode OMF was licensed to AVID in an effort to save Opcode from bankrupcy but as we all know that was a futile effort. I was never privied to the deal between them but it is possible that the deal between Opcode and AVID prevented them from freely distributing the Opcode OMF code. Then again it would not surprise me to learn that AVID is just being greedy. AVID spent a lot of money developing the who NLE thing, and for a number of years they have been king of the hill. There are a number of companies that benefitted from all that R&D that AVID did including Steinberg, Sonic Foundy(SONY) Apple, and Adobe. We are the greatest benifactors of this war because we have tools at greatly reduced prices that work really well. Those of you who don't remember the 16 track and twenty-four track AMPEX machines don't have any idea that it used to cost over 100,000.00 to have 24 tracks today we can do that for a mere fraction of that and companies like SSL are moving from monster consoles that cost millions to smaller consoles that do more and cost less than 60 thousand dollars.

[bigbadhenchman]

N-G-Neer, You have OMF confused with OMS.

And OMF is as much a standaras is pro-tools. Nowhere was it officialy ordained a standard, but if you are a post-house and can't deal with OMF's, you're introuble.

[aux]

Today I've spend a few hours moving a Logic (version 5 PC) song to a Pro Tools session (HD, on a Mac). The problems that occured had to do with PT not recognizing stereo files. In Logic, you can switch 'Convert Interleaved Files To Split Stereo', but this made sure that only the left side of the stereo files returned in the PT session. I'd also recommend to swith all tracks in Logic to Core Audio instead of DAE, because the Logic mixer is different when using DAE and this gave some problems as well.

So after converting, I added the right side of the stereo files separatly, they did appear in the region list in PT.

[bigbadhenchman]

I would suggest anybody doing alot of OM****** to get AC Transfer. It will convert stereo files to dual mono, perform file conversions, samplerate conversions etc. Well worth the money.

We were having some problems with OMF's being sent to us for a film we did. We ran them through AVTransfer, used the 'PT's Digitranslator" preset, and all was well. It spit out an OMF that could then be opened by digitranslator. It also has a selection for the old OMFtool as well.

Runs on a PC. But a real lifesaver.

[aux]

After trying a Pro Tools to Logic conversion through OMF, we ran into a new problem, the following (very descriptive) message appeared:

An OMF error has occured
Error code 205
Description OMFl_ERR: Bento container error

After a little search I found that Logic has problems with importing more than 107(?!) audio files through OMF:

http://community.sonikmatter.com/cgi-bin/emagic/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=20;t=000181;p=

[scottgreiner]

Wow. You're really getting down to the nitty-gritty. Thanks for doing the leg work. Sorry it's not going smoothly. I'v not had to go out of ProTools to anything else, as I'm alway the last guy in the chain. I don't own Digitranslator (yet), as it still irks me a little about the price, and the free OMF tool 2.8 still works great (in OS9 Classic) going in (can't export). The day it doesn't cut it, or I have to export from ProTools, is the day I buy Digitranslator - even though, as you've found, it's not exactly "working".

[aux]

It has been developed to go from AVID to Pro Tools and this is something is does well. I rarely encouter problems with this, it is more a problem with Logic than with the actual Digitranslator I suppose.

And I completely agree it should be a free feature in the next big Pro Tools update. They can keep developing the DV Toolkit for PT LE users and give the TDM users this feature implemented in the software.