MediaSift

MediaSift was the direct result of “wanting to make my life easier”, with regards to editing projects at home, then bringing them back to a client’s suite.

It allows you to very easily arrange OMFI MediaFiles on an Avid eding system. Unfortunately not compatible with MXF, but something is better than nothing?

I initially looked at a commercial software package, however it was out of my price range, and having not done any programming for a few years, I figured it would be an interesting challenge. To be absolutely honest, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I was expecting, and what you’re seeing here is about 3 weeks of “on and off” work to get it up and running.

The program probably isn’t very useful anymore as Avid has moved to MXF files, and this was written back in the Windows XP days. The documentation may be useful for some look into Avid’s file formats for those who want to write software to parse the Avid database files (still relevant).

I learned a lot of programming by developing this tool, implemented a custom version of quicksort to work on arrays, and a lot about accessing binary files to pull data out of them. Cool. It was all in VB, but that’s what I knew, and it was perfectly adequate for the job back in 2005. The installer and readme are mostly for the sake of completeness. While it would still work on a old machine, it’s probably not usefull anymore.

The coolest part of writing this tool was getting an email from Harpo productions (Oprah’s Production Company, asking about using it. Coolio!).