So, I talked about writing a program to convert Final Cut projects into Premiere projects. While the final program will be more or less accessible for anyone I have a sort of preview and this is only for the geeks among you. If you’re not technically expert, and I mean at the programming level, you are more then encouraged to keep reading this but I just wanted to warn you, it’s gonna start sounding like a gibberish very soon 
Premiere CS3 stores its projects as XML files. I don’t have any documentation about it but it’s not too hard to reverse engineer it. FCP can export a sequence, not a whole project, into XML. This is enough to give us a start. I wrote a draft of a program that for now simply reads a FCP XML files and outputs the information about it. It can be useful in the future for now it’s a sort of “data dump” to verify that the parser is in fact recognizing all the different permutations of footage formats, frame rates etc. If you feel inclined to give a try I will be interested in hearing from you when the program does not recognize your input. Feed it an XML files of choice and check the output. If it comes out as garbage give me a buzz. Now for the geeky part. The program is written in my favorite language, Perl. Perl is available on every conceivable platform but it’s included in every copy of Mac OS. Thank you very much Apple, this is one of the reasons why I keep buying your machines. In order to use “fcp2ppro” you have to run it from Terminal. The command is simple:
fcp2ppro NameOfFCPFile.xml
Where the first and only parameter is, of course, an XML FCP file that you have prepared before. If you never exported to XML from FCP, here is a quicky directon: Select your sequence and then use File/Export/XML… If everything goes well the output should be something like this:
I truncated the file because it goes on and on for 3 pages. It’s pretty self-explanatory. I’m deveoping the parser as a Perl package (object) so that we will be able to re-use it in other programs, just in case. The output that you see is the raw dump of the object list created in memory for each recognized element of the XML hierarchy. The program does not write anything yet so it should be perfectly safe but there are no guarantees about it. Anyway, here is the link, download it, test it, if you want to leave some feedback, which will be greatly appreciated, post on this thread. To install the program just copy it somewhere in your PATH and be sure that the files attributes are set to make it executable. If you can make it run use the chmod program to set the executable attribute: chmod +x fcp2ppro
If you need more informations remember the old saying: “use the Force, read the Source” 