[Andreas Kiel]

Jeremy.

It’s always a pleasure to talk to you – even if it’s only in post/thread discussions like now.

Again OT of the original thread!

The AXEL format seems to be quite similar to the XML out of FCPX.
I really admire the foolcut guys as they dived in quickly and more or less reliable gave interchange options (more or less is meant in a very positive way).
Mysterious AXEL is nothing really supported by Apple officially at this time and it might change any time soon without notification.
Many of the points you mentioned from foolcut are supported by the current XML export (to be honest I haven’t tried all of them), but I don’t believe that for example ‘•recreates original lane order for all timeline elements‘ is really reliable at this point of time.

You’re right if you say:

Most effects don’t get carried voer, but that is nothing new when going from FCP Legacy to AE. Some things just don’t carry over, or need to be recreated in the native application.

But the problem with XML at this moment is that one: Some things just don’t carry over, or need to be recreated in the native application – and in this case native application means: FCPX.

But don’t you think FCPX and Motion could potentially get further connected than simply creating a “user effect”, except the language simply isn’t there yet? Maybe not, but yes, there’s a ton of work to do, for sure.

You’re right, but let me tell a little story.
Start of story:
When I was young I had been on a kind of high school which was not held by the city but by the government – so we all were forced to be the best controlled pupils in the country, was bad and fun the same time. Two years before we had to get our ‘mature’ we had have learned everything we needed to do the ‘mature’, so one of our teachers suggested we ‘move’ the mathematics course from the school to the university to learn statistics and Boolean algebra, because that would be the future – all of us did follow and so we learned what a Boolean intersection meant in a logical way. Was 40 years ago.
End of story!

So FCPX XML/Format and Motion XML/Format don’t have have a big (if any) intersection at this time – but they didn’t had one before as well.
One of my favorite examples from text is following: with any app (including any app from Apple except Motion) the font ‘Gill Sans’ is called ‘Gill Sans’, with the actual Motion it’s called ‘GillSans’ – that doesn’t make life easier for both users and developers 😉
I would love to see a better integration, a common kind of ‘language’. But to be honest, it really will take a lot of time and work to get there – and needs better communication within Apple’s teams.

It’s late here and I stop at the moment, but more will come. I put another 2 cents on the others a had – that are 6 cents at the moment and with the current exchange rate it’s about 7.8 cents from Europe 🙂

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Jeremy,

As I’m a non native English speaker – I don’t know what ‘nerd’ means in this context. 🙂

The below is OT to the original thread!

With P2 it’s odd, it’s easy to copy some joined ref files to an event, it takes seconds with the mfx4mac component installed. The problem is that there are no metadata imported into FCPX – might not be a real problem as FCPX ignores or misinterprets some metadata while opening an P2 archive and you have to change or add those anyway. The problem is the XML handling as at the moment there is no metadata handling. And as said it’s a price point.

Philip is very positive, I from my point do see a lot of work to be done.

FCPXML is simple, somehow straight forward and robust – as there is ‘nothing’ in there – it’s kind of modern EDL.

It’s based (also) somehow on the ‘reference’ scheme which was used in legacy XML. While fx and options in FCP got more complicated/extended over the years, references made it more difficult for FCP to resolve them, so from a point of developer view it was much better for the end user NOT to create a small XML which uses references for the matter of import speed, and yes it created much bigger files. But what does file size mean these days?

In my personal opinion Apple has to rethink the whole XML stuff.
Look at the effects and effects settings which are not transported via XML.
As many things are based upon Motion you need to implement Motion XML into FCPXML or find a common XML. Should be doable – but makes it let’s say very special and very complicated.
Again from my point of view, there is only a little documentation about FCPXML – which is no wonder as there is nothing in there. There is documentation about Motion XML – but this documentation was written in 2010 way before the actual Motion was released, and it doesn’t match the actual Motion file format (I filed a bug and Apple knows about it).
Again look at my very little niche market with subtitles (only a few thousands of users). Create some subs, create an XML and import the XML you’ve created – all your settings are lost. For me it looks like a lot of work to be done and I’m not that optimistic as Philip is.

Let’s take another route let’s call it ‘route 1001’ for this (sub)title example. Take a clip and make 2 subtitles used from from the selection offered by FCPX, change each one to match your needs. For subtitles you probably will use one of the ‘Lower Thirds’. With the latest update of FCPX the project will open with the changes you made when you start FCPX again.
With XML it won’t. So what to do? Take ‘route 1001’ – before you add a build in (sub)Title ctrl-click it and select ‘open a copy in motion’, there you can change font settings etc. Just save it and apply/add to your timeline. Not a big deal. The fx is stored in your ‘User/Movie/Motion Templates/…’. From there on it’s not a build in template anymore but a user template. So with ctrl-click you only got the option open in motion’. You can do the same thing with the title as described above – but never hit cmd-S as it will change all titles in all projects you ever used your ‘custom’ title.
The result is that your XMLs are still small, but the amount of available titles will bloat and make editing less comfortable, as you have to remember any custom made fx name, at least if you want to work with XML. This not only applies to subtitles but to all Motion based fx.

As said in my precious post
my 2 cents

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Yes – Bruce really know how to do things like that!

Here some other point mentioned above

Jeremy wrote:

From what I have heard, the FCPXML information is extremely sparse at the moment. This is telling in that it’s just not quite there yet. It does not mean that it won’t mature or get additional capability.

I was trying to test an entire FCP7 project XML to PPro CS5.5 import yesterday. The FCP project is pretty big. 2000 elements, 200 something sequences, yadda yadda. The project file is 65MBs, the resultant XML representation was 175MBs, 2x+ the size. It happens, it’s just how the application deals with the bloat that is the problem. If it grinds everything to a halt, that’s not good

Jeremy you know I’m quite familiar with FCP XML and FCPX XML. People like Martin Baker, Philip Hodgetts, me and many others helped Apple to make legacy XML import and export better with each release (in most cases).
So all of ‘us’ learned that not the file size matters, but how fast (and good) the import is handled.

As I got several requests to integrate FCPX into my TitleExchange I made some tests comparing XMEML (7) to FCPXML (10). File size of v7 XML is for example 26 MB, file size of v10 XML is about 100 k.
First thought might be v10 XML is more effective – but then you look at the time it takes to import, the 26 MB file is imported into v7 in about 90 seconds (means ready to view and edit) the little v10 XML took more than half an hour. The strange thing is that the v7 XML really carried all information of the original into the copy created by the XML import, while the v10 XML didn’t carry anything else than clips and transitions.
So Aindreas seems to be right that there is a lot of work needed to make this new kind of data base handling effective – I’m very curious about the next version.
As for example titles are Motion FX they need to be rendered at least for an export. You can use background rendering or not, using the background version slowed down editing extremely, switching off this rendering made everything ‘normal’, but meant to have a final rendering at the end – in my tests FCPX took 80 to 120 times longer.

As mentioned by others here any NLE also lives from 3rd party support. Plural Eyes is a good example how to make life easier with FCPX. The demo also shows advantages and disadvantages of the new way of editing.

Another reaction of Apple I don’t understand (regarding third party): They told the MXF4mac guys that their component is not needed anymore as in FCPX everything is handled natively – would be okay and great. But with P2 everything is copied into a new QT wrapper, though the codec stays native. But this takes more or less the same time as the old L&T and doubles data as well.
If there would be a good XML support with FCPX I would be able to write a little importer app which really would work with P2 natively using the component and makes import P2 in a few seconds – but people would say: man – look at the price, the whole price is twice as expensive as FCPX. So I don’t create that app that for those two reasons.

Again my 2 cents

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Hi Gregor,

Have a look at the Help menu. It’s explained there how to create a template.

Regards
Andreas

P.S. the FCPX title exporter will be updated later today (European time)
I now makes a rough analyzis of the Motion XMLs and extracts font, font size and font style. I’m still working on alignment – means searching for this entry in this unfortunately undocumented Apple Motion XML.

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

I agree with Bernhard. Having the Cineform (and the GoPro) in the portfolio would widen their market – not moving it.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Sorry, I should have it the small help file that the STL extension should be .txt.
I will add that for the next version.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

It depends what you mean with third party app.
If you mean filters and effects, there are many new and updated ones.

If you talk about workflow tools there not that many.
Many if not most of these tools relied on the old XML versions of FCP which had been a very stable and mature version with the last release. Many of the developers helped Apple with sending bug reports, discussing feature request and so on. End the end of it’s life FCP XML was close to perfect. And it took years to go there.

But now with the totally new kind of XML from FXPX it starts in my honest opinion below zero and makes it difficult for developers like me to make useful apps based upon the current XML implementation.

Sure you can create a simple EDL import/export for video – for audio it’s a bit more complex because of the trackless nature of FCPX but can be done using roles. Roles can be used for video in this case as well.

It get more complicated when it comes to workflow apps which exchange metadata – it’s because new XML is less complicated then the old XML. Less complicated means there are no metadata, no nothing rather then name, role, timing, relations and references.
Some of the people here on the list know that I’ve done several apps which used metadata exchange or adding/editing metadata. At the moment it’s impossible to do something like that.
Jeremy was using one app of mine for handling P2 which allowed to handle P2 metadata upfront.
Other people just used the old L&T to import P2 and complained they couldn’t see the metadata (which are in the P2 files) in the FCP UI. They were right – on the other hand there where utilities which allowed to extract all metadata from the legacy XML as FCP stored nearly all of them and in many cases wrote them into the QT movie.
I had a custom project which was bit similar to Philip Hodgetts ‘Sync and Link’ though a bit more complex. It allowed to merge and sync video and external audio into a QT wrapper with scene/take/note written to the QT metadata. FCP reads those metadata, FCPX ignores them since it’s not based upon the old QT stuff.

Another example for an XML based app I did is my pretty successful TitleExchange, it allowed to extract quite a lot of generator settings and transfer them to other apps or the other way round. As there are no settings in the new XML any more this app doesn’t make any sense for any FCPX user at the moment. But I invested some time for the FCPX users on this. You can download both a title exporter and importer for free from the below links.
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/FCPXTitles.dmg
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/stl2FCPX.dmg
So there are 2 workflow tools more for FCPX:) But make sure to read the help files.

So anyway, I think that many developers just sit and wait for what will happen next year, Also sit and wait whether Apple will be bit better in documentation and response when it’s not about effects – just my personal oppinion.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Okay her some more about Motion based (sub)titling workflows.

They been around for quite a while in let’s say limited way.
See my little movie about that a did quite while ago:
https://www.spherico.de/filmtools/TitleExchange/MotionTutorial/

Meanwhile the Motion connection to FCPX (and Motion itself) is way more matured.
But there is a big BUT when it comes to interchange (sub)titles via XML.
The Motion templates don’t allow to export/import any settings and handling is very slow. Legacy fxScript based text generators did transport all info about any setting of a text. This allowed to change things like font, font size etc globally even if you didn’t know much about XML.
With the new way you can do it like it is shown in the movie, but only if you use your own templates. In this case no XML is needed – just change the settings in Motion and they will be applied to all instances in your project(s). So be careful when other then the actual project use the same template.

Sometimes you may want to import timed subtitles from an external text file. I created a little app which allows to create FCPXML from Spruce Text STLs. You can download it here from the link below.

https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/stl2FCPX.dmg

Regards
Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

Okay here part 1 of the prototype tools.

This version only extracts titles/subtitles from an FCPXML. It doesn’t have a global check for spelling and grammar, but one for title by title.

Before writing a long post here I uploaded the preliminary help file for the exporter:
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/XTE_Help.pdf

The full version which includes the PDF can be found here:
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/FCPXTitles.dmg

There are a lot of things to be done — especially from Apple (like making better documentation).
Also I’ve to learn more about this very basic XML handling of FCPX and the timing issues.
For the exporter everything works fine. The importer has some strange issues for me when I want to create secondary storylines which could be be pasted into other projects.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Andreas Kiel]

i always like layered TIFFs since they keep all the layer stuff, effects etc compared to flattened file formats like JPEG or PNG.
You might give it a try.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools