[Richard Scott]

[Chris Messineo] “”FCP7 projects do not have enough information in them to properly translate to FCPX (in FCP7 all of the clip connections live in the editor’s head, not in the timeline). We never expected anyone to switch editing software in the middle of a project, so project migration was not a priority.”

I hate to disagree with the man who developed the software because he knows more about its internals than I can ever hope to. But I have to call bull on this one, and maybe my lack of engineer-level knowledge helps here.

Final Cut Pro has a media library with metadata about your clips. FCPX has a media library with metadata about your clips. Surely you could figure out how to translate from one to the other.

Final Cut Pro has timelines, which are nothing more than a sequence of clips. These clips have starting points, ending points, and transitions between them. FCPX has a different sort of timeline… which also has clips arranged in a sequence, with starting points and ending points and transitions between them. At their core, timelines of all sorts are nothing more than ordered lists of things. So what if there’s no such thing as “Track A”, just arrange the clips in the same order as they are in FCP 7 and that gets us 90% of the way there.

“FCP7 all of the clip connections live in the editor’s head, not in the timeline.” I don’t even know what this means. When I open a FCP 7 project, the program knows full well what clip to place where. Sequences don’t appear in random order each time I open it. That’s all that needs to be translated.

Chris, I think you’ve gotten too engrossed with how different the internals are between the programs to realize that we don’t care about such engineering details. Both organize clips into sequences, and surely you could figure out how to translate an ordered list of things into a new, entirely different storage model. I do know some things like specific filters will not translate over. But you can always give us the option to (a) flatten it into a rendered clip (using FCP7’s renderer as a client process) or (b) remove effects and revert to the original media.

This isn’t impossible. It maybe difficult to translate data between two very different formats, and it would surely be time-consuming to implement and test. But it is definitely not impossible. It just takes time and effort that Apple has decided is not worth it. Everyone who has built a career on your software disagrees.