An ALE file serves as an Avid-style metadata sheet that provides a plain-text, tab-delimited way to transfer clip information rather than media, holding items like clip names, scene/take info, roll identifiers, notes, and the vital reel/tape plus timecode in/out fields, enabling editors to import footage pre-organized and helping with accurate later media matching.
To determine whether an .ALE is the Avid type, just open it in Notepad: if the content appears as simple metadata rows you can read with “Heading,” “Column,” and “Data” sections and tab-separated rows, it’s almost certainly an Avid Log Exchange file; if it instead contains garbled nonsense, it’s likely from another application, making the folder context important, and since Avid ALEs are small metadata files, a large file typically rules out the Avid format.
If you just want to see the contents of the file, opening it in Excel or Google Sheets as a tab-delimited import will show the columns neatly and makes scanning or filtering simple, though you should watch out because spreadsheet tools may alter timecodes by accident, and if you’re using it in Avid, the standard method is to import the ALE to create a bin of clips filled with metadata and then link or relink to the real media using reel/tape names and timecode, with the most common relink failures coming from mismatched reel names or timecode/frame-rate issues.
Commonly, an ALE file means an Avid Log Exchange file—a compact clip-info transfer file used in pro editing workflows, comparable to a spreadsheet in text form but built to communicate footage details such as clip names, scene/take notes, camera identifiers, audio roll references, set annotations, and the essential reel/tape and timecode in/out values, and since it’s plain text, tools or assistants can generate it and pass it to editors for consistent metadata loading.
The strength of an ALE lies in how it connects raw footage to a properly organized editing project, because once you import it into software such as Avid Media Composer, it automatically creates clips with ready-made metadata, sparing the editor from hand-entering everything, and later that information—mainly reel/tape names and timecode—can serve as a linking key to relink media, so the ALE acts as context rather than content, telling the system what each shot represents and how it ties to the original files.
Despite “ALE” most often meaning an Avid Log Exchange file, the extension isn’t exclusive, so the straightforward way to identify yours is to view it in a text editor and check for a readable metadata layout with clip, reel, and timecode fields; if present, it’s almost certainly Avid-style, but if absent, then another application likely produced it and you must rely on its origin to determine what it is.
