Tuesday, January 05, 2010

How to get audio from nested FCP sequences to Soundtrack Pro

I was having a serious issue today trying to send sequences over to Soundtrack Pro for finishing. I would send them along and then sit there and stare blankly at Soundtrack wondering why the first track of audio didn't import. It turns out because Final Cut nested sequences don't like to include themselves inside the XML that is sent to Soundtrack Pro. Go figure. I searched everywhere and the only answer I could find was I would have to do a bunch of copy and pasting or cmd+dragging around of sequences to get them ready to ship. Then I had the good fortune of noticing a sequence I had already color corrected in Color didn't have this issue. Hmmm... a little testing and I found it seems to work every time (in this case 9 sequences).

This is good for any of you out there editing with a 7D or 5D and syncing audio to them with Pluraleyes.

1. Select your timeline in the browser
2. File > Send to > Color
3. Allow it to open up in Color
4. In Color: File > Send to > Final Cut Pro
5. Open the sequence that Color sent back over - will have (from Color) added to end of the seq name
6. Select that new sequence in the Browser
7. File > Send to > Soundtrack Pro Multiclip Sequence

Let me know how it works for you. It seems to work for me every time so far. It seems as if once the roundtrip is done from Color back to FCP that it either mixes down that audio or surfaces it somehow.

2 comments:

Phil D said...

I tried it a couple of times but FCP stopped importing the XML(?) files at 82% then Color ceashed.

jeremyhughes77 said...

Were you using the new FCP3? I have to say this is definitely not a 100% of the time solution but it has worked for me around 90% of the time. The fullproof way I think I will typically use now though is to just import the raw MP4 files, sync them into timelines and then export those timelines as Prores and reimport. The conversion is a step I have to do anyway so it just slips in a few steps later.