FCP => Premiere conversion. Any interest?

[Paolo Ciccone]

The subject line pretty much sums it up.
I'm considering writing a conversion tool to import FCP sequences in Premiere. I got most of the interpretation o the FCP XML file done and now it's a matter of "injecting" all that safely inside a Premiere project.
Just wondering if there is anybody else, besides myself, who could use this. The tool will run on pretty much any platform that has a Perl runtime installed, every Mac and Linux installation, and will be free.

Let me know.

[Tyson Persall]

Dude, Totally.

This would help premiere's integration and acceptableness if people could easily swap a project from Final cut to premiere or vice versa. I am in the situation where i like to edit premiere but often work with editors who are on Final cut.

In an ideal world, the editing program you used, or anyone else used would not limit two people from working together.

[Bart Walczak]

Great idea. FCP=>Premiere=>FCP.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Bart Walczak

Great idea. FCP=>Premiere=>FCP.

Not sure I understand. The tool I'm writing will do the FCP => Premiere part.

[Bart Walczak]

I meant that it would be great to have a utility for swapping projects between both, either way. I'm sure most of the effects would get lost in the process, similarly premiere's audio track effects, but it would be great to have one guy do the preliminary editing on PPro, and then switch to FCP for touch up and colour correction.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Bart Walczak

I meant that it would be great to have a utility for swapping projects between both, either way. I'm sure most of the effects would get lost in the process, similarly premiere's audio track effects, but it would be great to have one guy do the preliminary editing on PPro, and then switch to FCP for touch up and colour correction.

I see, well, once I'm finished other developers can take the source code and implement the part about the PPro => FCP. Regarding the effects, yes, they will be hard to remap but things like scale and crossfade can be probably moved fairly easily between the two. That is, BTW, one of the reason for me to move to Premiere. Importing the Premiere project in After Effects preserves all the effects including the ones depending on plugins, like Colorista, that are shared between the apps. You start with a rough adjustment in Premiere and then fine tune it in AE at 32bit for maximum precision and you end up with film-like quality.

[Jiri Fiala]

Paolo, how open is Premiere for third party utils? I don`t mean plugins. Is it for example possible to write an util to make premiere play straight cuts only (=disable effects on playback)?

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Jiri Fiala

Paolo, how open is Premiere for third party utils? I don`t mean plugins. Is it for example possible to write an util to make premiere play straight cuts only (=disable effects on playback)?

There is no scripting language for Premiere but the project files are straight XML files. That's why I considered writing a conversion program. I can read the XML exported sequence from FCP and merge the data with a new Premiere project. So you could write a Perl script, for example, to create a copy of the project were all transitions have been removed or disable in some way.
For example, here is an excerpt from a project that has a Cross Fade:

<TransitionTrackItem Version="3">
<HasIncomingClip>true</HasIncomingClip>
<HasOutgoingClip>true</HasOutgoingClip>
<Alignment>158918760000</Alignment>
<TrackItem Version="3">
<TrackRefCount>1</TrackRefCount>
<TrackIndex>0</TrackIndex>
<MediaType>228cda18-3625-4d2d-951e-348879e4ed93</MediaType>
<Type>2</Type>
<End>2510916408000</End>
<Start>2193078888000</Start>
<Node Version="1">
</Node>
</TrackItem>
<DisplayName>Cross Dissolve</DisplayName>
<MatchName>ADBE Cross Dissolve</MatchName>
</TransitionTrackItem>

I haven't tried it but I guess that if you conver the 2nd and 3rd entry to false the transition will not work. It's worth a try!

[Eric Larson]

http://www.automaticduck.com Is a commerical product that goes FCP to AE then you can goto Premiere.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Eric Larson

http://www.automaticduck.com Is a commerical product that goes FCP to AE then you can goto Premiere.

Yes, I know, I used it in beta and it works beautifully but at $500 it's a lot of cash. My tool will be available for free.