Lightworks Tips: Tracking Sound Effect and Music Reel Numbers Or How to Keep Chainsaws Out of Your Love Scenes by John Venzon
	It's very important to give each sound effect and music cue a unique reel number in case you have to redigitize and find material to fill edit. When the Lightworks does this, it looks for two things: matching time code and matching reel number. This is not usually a problem because most of your footage will be from daily tapes. If you are digitizing straight off CD or DAT the Lightworks starts the time code at 00:00:00:00. This means that if you call all of your sound effects "FX" the Lightworks won't know the difference between each one. Every missing sound effect will be filled with the first shot that matches "FX" and 00:00:00:00, usually not the one you want. There are two ways to avoid this. The first is to transfer all of your music and effect cues to a time-coded format such as Beta, SVHS HiFi or DAT running at video speed (29.97 fps) and digitize from that. Make sure that every tape has it's own reel number and each tape goes up by one time code hour. If you delete a cue, it's a simple matter of redigitizing and finding material. When it comes time to do a temp dub, you can turn an EDL with tapes over to the sound crew making their lives much easier. The second, and more common way, is to go straight in from the CD or DAT and let the Lightworks generate its own time code. Since the code will always start at the same place, make up a couple of charts that have numbered reel names. For music I start with MX001, VO001 for voice overs and SFX001 for sound effects. I would stay away from using the FX for sound effects, as Lightworks system 4.0 will use that as the reel prefix for digital 'opticals' (flops, blue screen, etc.). You can print a blank form out at the beginning of each show and fill them up like so: I also include a space for the name of the effect, the source and what project it's in. This acts as a log of what has been digitized and where, as well as making sure you don't re-use reel numbers. Since you don't have a time-coded master for all of these cues, it's a good idea to get an extra optical disk to back up your effect and music. As everyone will tell you, there is no bigger drag than having to recut all your effects & music from scratch.
Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 16, No. 5 - Sept/Oct 1995.   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 776