Calculating durations of songs in a concert video

Apple Final Cut Pro X

Calculating durations of songs in a concert video

Posted by Bill Rabkin on December 5, 2019 at 3:56 am

Question: Is there a way to automate the transfer of Chapter Marker names and timecode from FCPX to Excel?

I record music concerts that I edit in FCPX 10.4.7 and deliver to my local Public Access station. Each concert consists of several songs. Concerts are about 1 hour long.

Sometimes a concert lasts a few minutes longer than 1 hour. When that happens, I must remove one or more songs so that the TRT does not exceed 60 minutes. Therefore, I need to know the duration of every song in the concert.

In the timeline, I place a Chapter Marker at the beginning of each song. To calculate song durations I subtract the timecode of a Chapter Marker from the timecode of the next Chapter Marker, and repeat this for each song throughout the timeline.

I’ve automated the calculations in an Excel spreadsheet. I’ve created the spreadsheet by manually typing the name of each song and the timecode of its Chapter Marker, reading them from the FCPX Timeline Index (Tags tab, Chapter Markers sub-tab).

I’ve tried copying all of the entries in the Timeline Index with Command+C, but FCPX doesn’t copy them. I’ve exported XML for a project and found the chapter-marker elements within it, but I don’t know how to convert the start value (such as 69001933/30000s) into a human-readable timecode (such as 00:15:34;00).

Typing all of the Chapter Marker names and timecodes into Excel is tedious and error-prone. I’d appreciate your suggestions about how I might automate this activity.

Thanks!

FCPX 10.4.7
iMac 27\” Retina 2017
macOS 10.14.6 Mojave

Bill Rabkin replied 5 years ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
2 Replies

Terry Barnum
December 5, 2019 at 8:55 pm

After reading about it on another thread, I started playing with the free CommandPost app from commandpost.io and it supports exporting the Timeline Index to a CSV. The exported CSV looks like:

Name Position Notes Song Title 01:00:37:04 song info Marker2 01:05:22:19 abccd

Seems like this would work for you.

-Terry
Bill Rabkin
December 5, 2019 at 10:46 pm

Many thanks, Terry. I had just stumbled upon CommandPost yesterday but had not installed it yet, and I didn’t realize that it includes exporting the Timeline Index.

I installed CommandPost a few minutes ago, set it up, and exported the Timeline Index of the project I’m working on. Voila! Exactly what I needed.

Thanks again,
Bill

FCPX 10.4.7
iMac 27\” Retina 2017
macOS 10.14.6 Mojave

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