The Lament of Cross Program Editing

Let me tell you something right here right now, Final Cut is NOT industry standard. This common misconception has caused me numerous hours of pain and turmoil. I prefer Adobe Premiere but it isn't industry standard either. However it is used on a number of TV programs, mainly BBC. However Premiere doesn't parade around that it's industry standard and isn't being force fed to me.

FCP however is. Here's a list of actual movies that were edited in FCP.
* The Rules of Attraction (2002)
* Full Frontal (2002)
* The Ring (2002)
* Cold Mountain (2003)
* Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
* Open Water (film) (2003)
* Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
* The Ladykillers (2004)
* Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
* Super Size Me (2004)
* Corpse Bride (2005)
* Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (2005)
* Happy Endings (2005)
* Ellie Parker (2005)
* Jarhead (2005)
* Little Manhattan (2005)
* Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
* The Ring Two (2005)
* 300 (film) (2006)
* Black Snake Moan (2006)
* Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
* Happy Feet (2006)
* Zodiac (2007)
* The Simpsons Movie (2007)
* No Country for Old Men (2007)
* Reign Over Me (2007)
* Youth Without Youth (2007)
* Balls of Fury (2007)
* "The Tracey Fragments" (2008)
* "Traitor" (2008)
* Burn After Reading (2008)
* The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
* The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
* Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
* Alien Raiders (2009)

Not that many, and anything not on this list you can assume was edited before editing software or was done on AVID. The only reason people like it so much is because Walter Murch, to most the undisputed god of editing, endorses it. All it is, is simply AVID. A much better program formatted for easier use by Mac users. It's the same interface Apple just ripped it off.

So why did I bring this up? Well we have a music video project to do and long story short our partner doesn't use Premiere. So we have to make him a Final Cut file. Well no problem we've done it before. Not so easy this time.

To make a Premiere file work in Final Cut you must make something called an EDL. This is a text document that details where cuts are in a timeline. This save file had 16 video tracks so we had to make 16 EDLs. Well the new Premiere, CS4, doesn't make EDLs that show the names of the files in the timeline. This means that if anyone wanted to reconnect media in a different program they couldn't because the names not there as a reference. We had to edit in CS4 because Pro 2, which is what I had on my PC at the time, can't interpret HD footage, it's too old. So this was quite a pickle.

After hours of work Daniel came into my room trying out a few ideas. Nothing worked. After searching myself for awhile I discovered a file type called AAF. It's like an EDL only 1000 times better as it saves the whole timeline in one file. So I saved our CS4 timeline as an AAF, opened it in Premiere Pro 2, and converted all the video tracks to EDLs. Then Daniel constructed the timeline in Final Cut. We tried to open the AAF in Final Cut but it wouldn't work.

It was a stressful process but it's done. Troubleshooting is such a pain in the ass.