Importing bins

Question

Hi there, I'm having some import issues that I could use some advice on.
The setup is one month-old FCS2 suite on a new Mac Pro, one 13-year-old Avid Composer suite that could breathe its last any day now.
I want to get at least the bins, if not the sequences, into the FCP system. I know about automatic duck but have not been given budget clearance to buy it, instead I've been asked to spend hundreds of dollars worth of work hours to find a kludgey workaround.
There are two vectors that I can see here:
1. Avid Log Exchange (ALE) to Cinema Tools Database to Final Cut pro. Success! But the clip names are all changed to (BinName)_(StartingTimecode). There are way too many clips and bins over on the Avid to change them all one at a time on the FCP. I can batch capture them though.
The question: using either Cinema Tools, FCP, or some spreadsheet/database program, How can I restore the clip name information in a way that FCP will recognize? (note that I can open an ALE in a spreadsheet app and easily copy the clip names en masse)
Vector 2: ALE to XML(Via Excel or OpenOffice), to FCP
This works great except that when I try to import the XML into FCP, I get the message "Please choose a translation document file". What is a translation document file and where can I get one? And will this even work?
The ALE is of course just a tab-delimited text file that opens perfectly in all three spreadsheet programs I've tried. From there it's just a few curse words to an XML file. I've tried changing the column names to match the appropriate column in FCP before creating the XML, but where am I really failing here?
Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

I've solved the problem, or at the very least, I've developed an only somewhat convoluted workaround that won't cost $500. I've seen other people searching for this, so I'll report my procedure.
This is for transferring bin contents from pre-XML versions of Avid to the current version of Final Cut Pro (FCS2).
When importing the Avid Log Exchange, FCP takes the clip's name information from the Scene column, not the Name column. The original Avid Name column is shunned by FCP, there's nothing you can do.
So on the ancient rusting Windows NT4 box, I first added the Scene column to the bin view, then copied one of the clip names into the relevant Scene column and exported the ALE.
I then slid over to the new Mac Pro, opened the ALE in an Open Office spreadsheet, so I could easily copy and paste the rest of the clip names into the Scene column.
Save as a Tab Delimited file. Change the extension to ALE.
Open Final Cut and select Import/Cinema Tools Telecine Log. Choose the new ALE file. Presto-chango, all those old Avid clips lined up nice and neat in FCP, ready to be captured.
I think the last two years worth of major projects ought to be sufficient to promote to Final Cut.
I guess we could pay Automatic Duck $500 to do this for us, but I've got a co-op student to make work for. Rock on. Bonus marks if he can pull it off by friday.