Transferring ADR Cues from Pro Tools to EdiCue

While printing ADR cues in EdiCue, text characters can sometimes be displayed incorrectly. If this is happening to you, you probably have a 'text encoding' issue.

As the data from a Pro Tools session needs to be saved as a text file to be loaded into EdiCue, in some situations we need to over-ride the default text encoding settings so that all characters appear correctly.

Below is a run through of how to transfer your cues from Pro Tools to EdiCue with the correct text encoding settings. For a background on text encodings, and more fun things to do with text files, see my blog post Transferring ADR Cues Part 1.

Selecting the correct Text Encoding

When exporting a text file from Pro Tools, its 'File Format' will default to TextEdit 'TEXT'. In Western countries on OS X this setting will export a text file with a Mac OS Roman encoding, while on Windows this setting will export a text file with a Windows Latin encoding. If your ADR cues only contain English-speaking characters, you could simply use this default setting.

If however your ADR cues contain non-English speaking text, it is best to export the text file with the setting UTF-8 'Text', which uses the Unicode encoding UTF-8.

Now start up EdiCue, open the preferences window, select the 'Text Encodings' tab and check the Text Encoding setting for 'Load Pro Tools text files using'. 

The following chart lists what this EdiCue preference needs to be set to:

Once the preference is set, you can load your Pro Tools text file into EdiCue.