Re: DaVinci Resolve 8.1 -- now with FCPXML roundtrip support

[Jeremy Garchow] "Can't iMovie export XML? That should pretty much end the conversation, right? They are NOT the same. Yes, they share ideologies, but they are not structured the same under the hood."

Not necessarily.

I've been arguing for some time that the FCPX to FCP7 one-way translation is relatively easy to do (you can translate the relative timing of clips to absolute time, discarding their relationships), but that the FCP7 to FCPX translation is substantially harder (since you can't infer the relationships between clips from just their positions in absolute time).

I'd suggest that one of the following two claims is true:

• If iMovie's data structure is the same as or very similar to FCPX's, then Apple implemented the FCPX to FCP7 translation for iMovie, but chose not to implement it in FCPX.
• If iMovie's data structure is not the same as FCPX's, but is very similar to FCP7's, then Apple solved the much harder FCP7 to FCPX problem, and only chose to implement it in FCPX via iMovie, not FCP classic.

Personally, I'd wager that iMovie uses a parent/child structure like FCPX, which makes its import into FCPX and its export to XMEML straightforward. I'd imagine they included XMEML support in iMovie because FCP7 still existed at the time, and I suspect they dropped it from FCPX floppy-disk-style because they EOL'ed FCP7.

I didn't know that iMovie did XMEML until you pointed it out. This actually makes me more frustrated and confused about Apple's thinking on interchange. iMovie can interchange with both FCPX and FCP7, but FCP7 and FCPX can't interchange with each other?

Walter Soyka
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