The Editblog

I couldn’t let the day go by without trying the XML importing capability that was added in the Adobe Premiere Pro 4.0.1 update to take and edit from FCP, export an XML and then import that edit into Premiere Pro CS4. The skinny? Not too shabby for a first try, both for Adobe’s implementation and my attempt.

From Final Cut I took a simple edit with 3 layers of video and audio. The original FCP timeline looked like this:

And the Premiere Pro CS4 XML import of this sequence:

That’s not bad. Dissolves are right, disabled clip is disabled, everything looks like it’s there. Premiere doesn’t have an indicator for a through-edit like FCP does. Of special note is that this is a 23.98 HD ProRes edit. Premiere Pro was able to relink to the ProRes QuickTime files as well as render in the ProRes codec for playback in the Premiere Pro timeline. Makes since as ProRes is an installed codec on the system. I have no idea if this is officially support btw.

You even get a nice little text file that imports into Premiere Pro to let you know what may have gone wrong in the import:

The above sequence had a number of color corrections from Magic Bullet Looks that didn’t translate and they were noted in the report. I’d call that a successful first test from FCP to Premiere Pro. But then when I went to send that edit to After Effects it crashed. We’ll have to troubleshoot that one later. A simple, single layer SD edit was able to successfully go from FCP to PPro to AE. I think this is something a lot of people might be looking for as a workaround if you don’t have Automatic Duck. Theoretically it’s possible but something wouldn’t let me HD sequence work. Maybe it didn’t like the ProRes files.