Short Film Update: Dividends Already
February 21, 2007

Last night Dan and I worked out some of the kinks that cropped up with the short. Major conflict was that I edited on a newer edition of Final Cut Pro Studio than he did, 5.1.2 vs. 5.0. Mine is a post binary re-write to take advantage of the Core2Duo chips. Dan is still utilizing the older software designed for two Intel processors.

To update his copy requires getting a disk from Mac, which was going to take far too long. It looked like we were going to have to create a whole new project and re-edit the movie from scratch...

Enter XML.

Apple has an Exchange format built into FCP. Basically, all the edits, tweaks, colors, sounds, and assorted work done on a project can be exported as a text file and imported into a different program to replicate what was going on. I was able to save a rather complicated document to a .txt file that contained a text representation of every bit of activity that I'd done. Dan opened it in his edition of FCP, reconnected media, opened my project files, and voila, he had a full copy of my project, ready for editing.

Note to anyone stumbling across this entry while searching for "Importing newer Final Cut Pro project into older Final Cut Pro program" in a search engine, all I did was use the EXPORT drop down, clicked the XML link, and used the VERSION 2 interchange format. This created a readable file that Dan used in reverse, with IMPORT, XML, etc. to duplicate my work in his older edition of FCP.

Also, I had a problem mailing the XML file. Apparently, Apple Mail doesn't understand how to package the XML file for transport (I've run into that problem before with back-up software.) Workaround is to Zip the XML, and attach the archive to the Mail message. No problem after that.

Last note. Dan noticed -- well, to him it was blindingly obvious -- that I'd frakked the settings in the project, having imported 16:9 footage into a project and tagging it twice as anamorphic. I thought it looked fine on the screen but apparently I was just asking for trouble...

We couldn't find an easy way to correct every sequence and nested sequence in the project. No global changes were working. Finally, what we did was click into the "Effects" tab, drop down the "Distort" section, and reset the field to "0." That cleared everything up. Takes forever and a day to do that in all of the sequences, but it fixed a problem I didn't even know I'd made.

Frakkin learning curves.

Posted by Jody at February 21, 2007 11:19 AM

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