Avid editors and assistants working in long-format television or feature films know dealing with music can be cumbersome. Pulling large volumes of music tracks and tracking them through the licensing process can involve a lot of backtracking and headaches. Assistants need to scour the timeline to gather song titles, their start and endpoints, and how many times they were used, a manual process. It’s also limiting and inefficient for editors to sift through tracks without additional song details besides just their filenames. An AMA plugin called mus.iD that carries across the metadata embedded in the ID3 tag offers a solution.
All the metadata tabs found in your iTunes library, such as composer, beats per minute, comments, album name, and track name, to name a few, carry over through the mus.iD plugin into Avid. mus.iD works with both .mp3 and .m4a files, making converting files unnecessary.
Justin Kwan, the founder and owner of Super 16 Solutions that develops mus.iD, and Michael Phillips, the solution and workflow designer, are behind the plugin. In addition to facilitating the creation of cue sheets, according to Phillips says this about the metadata:
[It acts as] creative information the editor may use when looking for a particular song. A tag including beats per minute, genre, or the key of a song becomes useful for the editor to narrow down going through hundreds of songs. So there are both creative and technical elements to the plugin.”
When the assistant needs to hand off the tracks used in the sequence to the producers for licensing, nothing needs to be broken down. Exporting an AAF of the sequence as the editor cut it and dropping it into an included AAF parser application automatically generates a tab or comma delimited .csv text file that can be used to generate a cue sheet. All of the metadata including the start, end, and duration in the sequence is preserved.
The plugin was released several weeks ago for both Windows and Mac, retailing at $19.95 for the AMA plugin and $9.95 for the reporting application, or at a bundle price of $24.95 for both. Demo versions of both applications will be available soon. For immediate news you can sign up at mus.iD’s Facebook page.
Phillips will also be doing an event at Moviola on May 6th where the plugin will be demonstrated. Be sure to sign up.
What do you think of the plugin? Would you want to see this plugin implemented for other NLEs?
Link: mus.iD website
Tristan Kneschke is a freelance editor and colorist who operates Exit Editorial based in New York City. He has worked with a long list of clients including Victoria’s Secret, Pepsi, Amazon, Nissan, Colgate and Google, and has also enjoyed working with such artists as Beach House, RJD2 and Killer Mike.
