Automated Cue Sheet Service - Save Hours!

If you work in television production, there's a good chance you are way too familiar with the hassle of creating and submitting cue sheets for each production. For those that are not familiar, a cue sheet is a document that identifies every music use in a production and specifies things like the duration of the cue, in and out times, type of usage, composer and publisher. These cue sheets are submitted to broadcasting companies and performing rights organizations like BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, etc. If you are doing cue sheets, you know the amount of time it takes. If you're not required to do cue sheets, consider yourself lucky.

As the technology leader in the music library industry, SmartSound decided to provide a solution to this music-related nightmare. After learning the needs of numerous production companies, our engineering team has created an online service that can take you from zero to cue sheet in a matter of minutes...no more hours of wasted time.

Here's how it works:

1. When using library music (from ANY library) in your project, make sure to keep the filenames the same as what was provided to you by your music library company. This is an important part of finding the source of each cue. Also, it is a good idea to dedicate 2 to 4 tracks of your project exclusively for music...this is good organization and it simplifies the tracking of all your music usage.
   
   
2. Once your project is complete, use your video editing software to create an EDL file (CMX3600 or GVG7 format) of just the tracks that contain the music cues. An EDL is an Edit Decision List, which basically means that your project is translated into a machine-readable text file. This part allows us to do our automation. (Note: This service will even work with EDLs from Pro Tools.)
   
   
3. Now, when you're subscribed to SmartSound's automated cue sheet service, just upload your EDL file to the SmartSound BackStage site and your entire project will be instantly formatted as a cue sheet with all of the tedious calculations done and even the research of the composer and publisher information completed and inserted in your cue sheet. (Note: This service works for ALL music libraries, so whether you've got multiple music libraries or a dedicated composer, this service can work for you.)
   
   
4. The service allows complete editing of your cue sheet data and even provides an Export to Excel feature that gives you the data in a format that gives you complete flexibility for getting the job done as quickly as possible.

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