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Edit Automation
Hi there,
I’m looking for a way to have FCP automated. (I’m using FCP 5.1.4)
FCP has to look into a folder full of .mov clips, and put them all on the timeline in a row. After that I can start rendering myself.My first thought was to create an FCP-XML file containing the names of the movieclips and their duration in frames. I can then import the XML into FCP and start to render. The problem here is to write the XML file: how can you read the amount of frames a .mov has in e.g. Applescript? That might be off topic though.
Is this the right approach? Or is there maybe a totally different solution?
Cheers,
Bart -
7 Replies
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Shake might be the program for you.
It is very scriptable. -
Thanks!
Didn’t know about Shake, sounds good. I’ll take a look into the trail version.Meanwhile: does anybody a comment on my XML plans? Would it be worth the shot?
Bart
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Final Cut is not scriptable. You could probably use applescript to give you the length of a quicktime, and then pass that to XML, but you’d have to pretty adept at both Applescript and some text processing language (Perl?).
Have you considered Traffic from xmEdit. That might do what you want:
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“FCP has to look into a folder full of .mov clips, and put them all on the timeline in a row. After that I can start rendering myself. ”
the first part also seems very simple, and could be done with only a few keystrokes.
doing this with XML would probably take longer.
can you be a bit more specific about what you need to do?nick
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Of course!
(btw, I’m more a programmer than an editor, I’m figuring this out for my collegue who will do the editing)
Reading the file properties is the first thing. I already figured that out. Indeed just a few keystrokes.
Now I need to insert some of the values (name & duration in frames) into an XML document. For the document I will use a previously exported FCP-XML file. It describes the template-timeline-edit in FCP, I’ll use that XML file as a template.
Haven’t looked into it yet, though I don’t expect it to be very hard to ouput an XML file by applescript. Steven Gonzales already mentioned above I might need Perl (or a language alike) for that. If anyone can shed some light on whether it is possible to ouput a file by applescript.The XML file will be manually imported into FCP where the render-button will be hit.
In FCP the edit roughly looks like a background with different movies laying on top. Movies that run out will be replaced by new ones. Because their length differs I need to adjust their length in the XML file. (arring this is a potentional bottleneck)I hope this clarifies the setting, maybe a bit too elaborate.
What I would like to know most is: is it feasible to implement? -
I’m looking into Traffic right now. Looks very promising and probably exactly what I’m looking for.
Though the forum seems to be flooded with spam since september 2007 and I get a 404 on clicking ‘download update’. Do you have any experience with their support/community/reliability? -
Hi Bart.
I’m looking for someone who has expertise with FCP XML functionality. Were you successful in figuring out how to do your automation?
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