With the release Tuesday of Final Cut Pro 10.0.1, Apple added the ability to import and export XML files. While not a direct benefit to FCP X editors, indirectly, this is huge. Let me explain why.

Video, and film, editing is accomplished using a wide variety of software tools. I like to think of editing as a wheel, where the editing software is at the hub and lots of different specialized tools orbit around it. From Photoshop, to ProTools or Soundtrack Pro, to After Effects or Motion, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro…. well, you get the idea — it takes a whole suite to raise a project.

This was one of the big problems with FCP X at release — it offered a walled garden. As long as what you needed was in the program, you were fine. But if you needed to share files to other applications, you had problems. Basically, you couldn’t.

One of the most glaring omissions was audio mixing — we couldn’t get our audio out of FCP X into Soundtrack Pro or ProTools for an audio mix. Wes Plate and the talented folks at Automatic Duck came to our rescue with Pro Export FCP 5.0, which exported FCP X projects for ProTools. — http://www.automaticduck.com/products/pefcp/ –

But that solved only a part of the problem; it got us to ProTools, but we were still essentially caught inside FCP X.

With the release of FCP X 10.0.1, Apple provided the ability to export and import XML. XML is the interchange language of applications. From XML we can derive EDLs, OMFs, AAFs, and all the other acronyms we need to move files from one place to another.

However, there’s still a problem – XML is like language, there are variations. Which means that before we, as editors, can take advantage of this, developers need to work with it first.

Let me explain by way of an analogy. Think of XML as a tab-delimited text file (it isn’t, really, this is an analogy…). However, that file is written in French, while other applications expect the file to be in English. So, a developer needs to convert this XML format from the version exported by FCP X, into the version needed by their application.

Wednesday night, Philip Hodgetts, CEO of Intelligent Assistance, demoed a beta program they are developing that illustrates what this new XML feature provides. Philip showed how an FCP X project can be exported as XML, converted, then imported into FCP 7. From FCP 7, it can be sent to Soundtrack Pro for mixing, or ProTools via OMF, or Color for color correction, or any of the other applications that link in with FCP 7.

The program is called: “Project X27″ and should be released in the next couple of weeks. It is SO new, in fact, it doesn’t have a webpage yet – when it does, you’ll find it at this website: — www. intelligentassistance.com –

I think this signals the tip of the iceberg where, finally, FCP X editors can start to share elements of their programs with the rest of the world. This still requires developers to do their part to support this, but the new XML export in FCP X 10.0.1 is the essential first step.

As always, let me know what you think.

Larry

UPDATE – Sept. 16, 2010

Yesterday, Apple updated Final Cut Pro to 7.0.3 which, among other things, fixes this problem. You can get the latest version via Software Update. If you are running an earlier version of Final Cut Pro, please read on.

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Andreas Kiel, of Spherico, brought this to my attention yesterday.

There’s a problem with the XML Export function in Final Cut Pro 7.0.2. As Andreas writes:

Over the last few weeks I got more and more mails from people who complained about missing line breaks in XML metadata text entries — and they asked for a workaround.

The issue is very simple and probably won’t affect too many of your readers, but I got more than hundred mails about that issue.

So it’s simple. Enter a text with line breaks into any metadata field which allows that — like with text generators, markers or comments.
They could look like this in FCP:
line 1
line 2
line 3

The XML exported will give you a value:

line 1 line 2 line 3

with any app which tries to interpret the XML — this includes FCP itself.

This is a real disaster, if you working with subtitles which are are sent forth and back between systems using XML. I got a customer who had a documentation with 7 languages each about more than 2000 subtitles which were fine tuned within FCP — all in all there were around 15,000 subtitles screwed up for release on DVD, film, YouTube etc.

It was solved by the workaround described below – the customer was more than happy. Imagine, if you need about 1 minute to control each title, it would take about 250 hours to fix this one movie.

Andreas went on to detail the solution:

This is a known bug of FCP 7.0.2 and will affect all XML exports and there is no workaround within FCP. This is more than annoying if you work with subtitles, but it can/will be the same little disaster if you want to ‘downgrade’ to a lower version of FCP or collaborate using XML as interchange format.

So if you already updated to 7.0.2 here a tip how you can create ‘clean’ XMLs.

1. Move your ‘Final Cut Pro.app’ from the Applications folder to the Desktop
2. Insert your FCP installation DVD and install FCP 7.0 only
3. After installation is done, rename the freshly installed ‘Final Cut Pro.app’ to ‘Final Cut Pro 7.app’ – this way it won’t be touched by any automatic updates
4. Ctrl-click the ‘Final Cut Pro 7.app’ and select “Show Package Contents”
5. Navigate to Contents/MacOS/Final Cut Pro
6. Create an Alias of the ‘Final Cut Pro’ either on the Desktop or in the Dock.
7. Close the Folder
8. Move your current ‘Final Cut Pro.app’ back to the Applications folder

Procedure:
If you want to export an XML from your current FCP 7.0.2 then
1. Save your project
2. Double-Click your Alias ‘Final Cut Pro.app’ executable which you have created earlier. ‘Terminal.app’ will start and maybe give some error messages which might be interesting, but can be ignored.
3. An instance of FCP 7 will launch beside your FCP 7.0.2
4. Open your current project with FCP 7
5. Export XML without saving the project
6. Close the project or keep it open when you know you have to export more changed XMLs from that project — use the “Revert” menu to update from your 7.0.2 project
7. Never save the second instance of your project

Notes
1. If you know that you have to do a lot of XML exports, keep the FCP 7 instance open – it will share all the settings with the FCP 7.0.2
2. To quit the FCP 7 instance, close the ‘Terminal.app’ window related to your FCP 7 instance – this is cleaner than quitting the FCP 7 instance
3. Once you have created the FCP 7 version on one machine, you can copy it to other machines where you need it without using the Installer, you only have to create or fix the Alias

Larry adds: As you can probably tell, this workaround is not for the new user. But for those people that have experienced the problem, now you have a solution.

Thanks,

Larry

Michael Cowan sent me a note earlier today that I wanted to share with you.

He was having problems sending sequences from Final Cut Pro to Soundtrack Pro (STP). Since I do this all the time with my own projects, without problems, I couldn’t figure out why he was having difficulty.

First, I suggested that he send his sequences from the Browser, rather than selecting all the clips in the Timeline. I find sending Browser files to STP to be more reliable.

That didn’t work.

Second, I suggested that he trash both his FCP and STP preference files. I have found that corrupted FCP preference files can mess with sending files to STP.

That didn’t work.

Hmmm… time to think. However, while I was thinking, Michael did some research. What he didn’t mention when we were first talking about this was that the sequence he wanted to send contained other sequences in it (what Apple calls “nesting.”) Ah-HAH! Using nests causes problems. As Michael wrote:

“Alas this issue lies with the well-documented nested sequence/XML problem that prevents “Send To” of nested sequences to Soundtrack Pro. I’ll need to change my workflow. There was some guy [Jeremy Hughes] who said he had success by Sending To Apple Color, back to FCP and then on to STP (perhaps Color generates cleaner XML), but it didn’t work for me.”

For those that need more information, here is the link to Apple’s support site:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2155

And here’s the link to Jeremy Hughes‘ Color workflow workaround:

http://filmvideostuff.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-get-audio-from-nested-fcp.html

Thanks, Michael, for sharing this!