XML

[Andy Mees]

wow … thats an enormous question !

what is XML? it stands for Extensible Markup Language
here’s a link to help you out (but you wouldn’t catch me reading that stuff) https://www.w3.org/XML/

with respect to FCP, XML is an interchange format for describing anything from a clip or sequence to an entire project

beacuse its text based it is a very open format, which means that with a little effort, anyone can write a script to parse the raw xml file and extract or manipulate the data they need

check out Apples pdf on the subject
https://developer.apple.com/appleapplications/download/FinalCutPro_XML.pdf

as to what its good for .. here are some examples:
https://www.xmedit.com
https://www.gallery.co.uk/XMLPro/xmlpro.html
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/

i’ve used it to parse rtf documents and automagically create text generator items for subtitling, and also used it for converting Avid .ale files to fcp clip bins

whether or not XML is useful to you depends entirely on your workflow and needs

hope that helps
Andy

[David Chai]

How did you convert ALE’s into FCP bins?

David 😀

—————–
David Chai
Director . Camera . Editor
http://www.davidchai.com
dc@davidchai.com
212 363 0159

[Andy Mees]

simply put …
1. create an empty fcp xml file
2. write an fcp xml bin item to the file
3. read the ALE file
4. for every clip item: rewrite the clip as an xml clip item
5. save the fcp xml file

scripted using php as part of a larger web based project management system
obviously some time and energy in creating the script, but it saves us a lot of time not having to use SebskyTools to first convert ale’s to batch lists, create bins and import (also Sebsky Tools hasn’t been updated for FCP5 multi channel audio, so it wasn’t quite working for us anyway)

[David Chai]

Do you have any plans on releasing this as a commercial product???
I’m sure there would be a lot of people interested in this.

—————–
David Chai
Director . Camera . Editor
http://www.davidchai.com
dc@davidchai.com
212 363 0159