Revision [1621]
This is an old revision of ParisOmf made by admin on 2010-02-24 14:40:55.
PARIS and OMF
Wikipedia tersely states that OMF is "Open Media Framework (OMF) or Open Media Framework Interchange (OMFI)... a platform-independent file format intended for transfer of digital media between different software applications."
The "plain English" version of this is "exactly what you see in your Editor Window gets exported", as well as the files from which those segments are derived (so you can, for example, re-do an edit on a segment, lengthening the exposing more of the audio file that segment came from). As to "what it gets exported to", the answer since 2001 has been "pretty much nothing"; the OMF was very loosely adhered to, its implementation varied widely, and no application ever learned to read PARIS OMFs properly.
There it sat for nine years until developer Michael Rooney from AATranslator discovered how data was stored in PARIS OMFs and taught his application to parse them into other file formats.
The PARIS OMF Pre-flight Checklist.
Exporting OMFs from PARIS is a simple process. There are no options or choices to make; you simply choose "Export OMF" from the file menu, PARIS begins the process of creating an OMF and either reports success, or, as is most often the case, failure. This checklist will help you export working OMFs.
1) Name things properly
This may seem odd, but PARIS will allow you to name things in such a way that it can no longer deal with them. The "slash" character is forbidden (it's reserved for describing directories) as is the "period" character; there may be more.
Here are the most frequent causes of illegal names:
You have included an illegal character in the name of the Mixer Channel the audio is on. Not in itself an illegal act - but the moment you render the audio and it picks up a new name from the track it's on... Step 1A is to check that you haven't named a channel with an illegal characters in the Mixer WIndow (try to use alphanumerical characters only).
You have named segments on the playing field. Normally PARIS is fine with this. But if you look closely at the name on the edit screen, you'll see a "slash" character in it separating the name of the file from the name of the segment. This illegal character will prevent
2) MAKE SURE YOUR AUDIO ISN'T CORRUPTED
If anything, PARIS' OMF export is even more intolerant of corrupted audio files than the application itself is. A corrupted file in your exported OMF can either cause the OMF export to fail outright - or to successfully export a damaged OMF. The symptoms of a damaged PARIS OMF include: incompleteness, wrong audio files being associated with a segment, or an OMF that won't open at all. Step 2 is to verify that you have no corrupted audio files in your PPJ.
3) AVOID MIXING SAMPLE RATES
One of PARIS' bizarre strengths is the ability to mingle 44.1k and 48k audio in the same session and have them both play back correctly. Unfortunately, very few DAWs can do this, so if you export an OMF with mingled samplerates it will complete correctly and open correctly, but the audio will play back "wrong" in most destination formats. Obviously this is not really a "bug" in PARIS (it's a PARIS *feature*) but since other DAWs won't be able to read the session correctly, step 3 is to make sure all your audio is at the project sample rate (mingling bit depth - ie 16 and 24 bit files - is fine).
