How to generate a music log from a studio show (PT & EdiLoad)

[noiseboyuk]

EDIT - with many many thanks to Peter Gates, there is now a new, better method which does not require EdiLoad. Scroll down to Post 6.

After many years I'm the script supervisor's best new friend, as I've finally cracked a way to generate a complete music log of everything in studio recorded show. This is for any show recorded with an audience on one day, it will be more complex over multiple days, I'll let someone else figure that out! It is also assuming you have conformed media including a clean track of music played into the show.

For this you will need:

Pro Tools (almost any version I think)
EdiLoad from Sounds In Sync
The daily log from SpotOn studio playout software (or equivalent)
MS Excel (I suspect Google Sheets could do all this too mind).

The end result will be an Excel spreadsheet with 2 tabs. The first will be a complete music EDL of everything in show whether played in or added in the edit / dub. All studio play ins will be labelled Studio Music, everything else will be labelled by file name. To find out what studio music is what, the second tab will have a list of Time Of Day music cues, and the PA / Script Supervisor can cross reference each timeline cue with the stated Time Of Day.

1. Get the SpotOn log, import into Excel (delete obvious crap from rehearsals etc)
2. Export your regular music tracks in PT as a text file in the usual way, and tidy up in a new Excel file, sorting by Start Time.
3. Delete any leading zeros that PT has generated from the timecode INs using Replace in Excel.
4. Get your conformed studio music track in PT, and in a copied project delete every other track (just for speed this - Ediload takes ages to load a full project)
5. PT - Strip silence (Edit menu)
6. Save this project and import into EdiLoad (make sure prefs are set to original time code not user time code)
7. Export as a text tile from EdiLoad, import into Excel as a third sheet
8. Find a sample cue, and cross check source timecode with the SpotOn log. Likely it will be slightly out - calculate the offset, then paste special and subtract to all Spot On timecode values so they match exactly.
9. Append the Studio Music conform to the Pro Tools Music list, sort all the columns so they tally with both, then do a sort so everything is listed by timeline Start Timecode.
10. Copy the SpotOn log into a 2nd tab in Excel - done.

Once I'd figured out how to do it, the whole process takes about 20 minutes and cuts hours / days off the script supervisor time. They Will Be Very Grateful.