FCP7 XML to FCPX

[John Davidson]

If media and cuts had come across I would have probably started shouting mean things at my mac.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Chris Kenny]

[Sam Krauser] “Someone has apparently figured it out…”

No, they haven’t.

This video is basically an elaborate troll. FCP X has the same behavior (creating a blank new project) when importing an empty file that has been named as if were an iMovie project. He’s not even right about the format of iMovie projects — they’re not XML files, they’re packages containing (among other things) project data stored as serialized Core Data objects. Third parties can’t (sensibly) create these files. This guy’s ‘discovery’ is entirely useless as a route to getting FCP 7 sequences into FCP X.

Once FCP X has the ability to import XML files, it will be possible for some third-party to write a script that translates (as much as possible) between the FCP 7 and FCP X XML formats. That’s probably how the project import issue will be solved — sort of. With all the differences in timeline behavior, keyframing, the rendering engine, the included filters and generators, the available compositing modes, etc. people shouldn’t expect such translation to work all that well, which is probably why Apple doesn’t want to build it in — they don’t feel they can deliver something they can stand behind.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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[Paul Dickin]

[Chris Kenny] “With all the differences in …the rendering engine, the included filters and generators, the available compositing modes, etc. people shouldn’t expect such translation to work all that well, which is probably why Apple doesn’t want to build it in — they don’t feel they can deliver something they can stand behind.”
Hi
I just found this, which presumably explains some of the difficulties:

AVFoundation takes an entirely different tact. It actually uses CoreAnimation as it’s rendering backend, meaning for editing you create an entire CoreAnimation tree, and push it into AVFoundation when it’s time to render. CoreAnimation itself let’s you do the realtime previews.

This is incidentally why importing a FCP7 into FCPX is a bad idea. CoreAnimation is not going to be a pixel accurate representation of what you had in your FCP7 project.
https://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=12882751&postcount=42

[Gary Huff]

That’s like saying you have a new rendering engine in QuickTime that makes playing back older .MOV files impossible.

[Michael Cacioppo jr]

Hi – just stumbled across this. I think this is an elaborate troll – https://bl0rg.net/trolls/Troll.jpg

My video was only meant to get a discussion started.

I was hoping that smart people who know things like, for example, that iMovies projects are actually project data stored as serialized Core Data objects. You know – that sort of thing.

Never claimed to figure it out – nor to know what I was talking about with that particular topic.

Anyway – FCPX 10.0.1 out today supporting some XML