Apple Final Cut Pro 5 - Manual (Page 1518)

Chapter 12 Importing and Exporting Final Cut Pro XML 167
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Overview of the Final Cut Pro XML Interchange Format
The Final Cut Pro XML Interchange Format was designed to describe every element in a
Final Cut Pro project in a human-readable, XML-based format. Final Cut Pro can import
and export this format, opening a world of possibilities limited only by your ability to
generate and process XML documents.
Because Final Cut Pro supports XML, you are no longer limited to creating clips, bins,
and sequences within Final Cut Pro. This means you can create your own Final Cut Pro
projects outside of Final Cut Pro, using any software or platform you want, as long as
you generate a valid Final Cut Pro XML file. Even if you don’t want to create
Final Cut Pro XML from scratch, you can practice working with Final Cut Pro XML by
exporting a clip or sequence to an XML file, opening it in a text editing application,
making minor modifications, and then importing the modified XML file back into
Final Cut Pro.
For example, if you have 100 clips that all have “Koffee House” in the name, and you
want to change the names to “Coffee House,” you can export the clips to Final Cut Pro
XML, open the XML file in a text-editing application, find “Koffee” and replace with
“Coffee,” and then import the resulting XML file back into Final Cut Pro.
Another example is when working with text generators or overlaid graphics. Suppose
you have a sequence with hundreds of subtitle text generators, and you want to subtly
change the color or position of each subtitle. Manually moving each subtitle in
Final Cut Pro would be extremely time-consuming. Instead, you can export the
sequence as XML and then find and replace all of the positional parameters or color
settings at once.
These examples are only the beginning. You can also change clip In and Out points,
change the order of clips in sequences, or modify effect parameters. The more you
experiment, the more potential you will discover for modifying Final Cut Pro elements
using XML.