FCPX Collaborative Subtitle workflow

I get quite a lot of requests to help with subtitle organization. This weekend I got a nice one about subtitles with FCPX and my free XTE app in an collaborative environment.

The person said my app is not working with big projects and creates an error message and hangs. He was wrong or right - he haven't read the manual which says "Compound Clips with titles are not supported". His project was based on compound clips only. Funny thing was that FCPX behaves the same and doesn't support compound clips.

Here the "super easy FCPX way to extract".

First the wrong way old fashioned editors expect it to work:

Import the XML (with compound clips and titles) into FCPX — this will take a while, maybe a long time. You will get get an error message.



The error message can be ignored in a way that you don't quit FCPX. This error message will follow again and again during the next steps.
And you take it serious - no projects or events will be saved correctly.

Finally you can open the compound clips and export those as XML, which works. But there is one problem: FCPX cant't import those XMLs.




So here the right way modern editors should work with it:

If you already did it the wrong way, clean up your Event folder(s) first.
Launch FCPX and create a new empty project for the subtitles.
Now quit FCPX - as mentioned this project needs to be saved first as it won't/can't be saved once you import the XML.
Now launch FCPX again and import the XML.
Open the compound clip and copy all subtitles (ignore error messages) and paste them into the empty project you have created before.
Now export this project as XML.
Force quit FCPX (otherwise it will take days or more).
Relaunch FCPX and import the subtitle XML.
Clean up events and projects.

Now it will work with XTE or other apps.

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]