Another update for X-Title Importer

A few weeks ago I had a request from a director in Egypt working on a huge documentary and jumped from FCP 7 to FCP 10.1.1.

He wanted to work with subtitles right from the start of editing and was looking for a workflow to make that seamless and fast working with his translator located half the way around of the world.

I (we) finally solved it.
I thought I should share the experience to help others in same situations to make life easier.

The way to go:
He wanted to create some selects as little projects. So he did and added a chapter marker every time he needed a subtitle. Then he "abuses" the posterframe to set the length. Latter isn't necessary but make a lot of sense.

A low res movie with chapters is exported. A FCP X XML as well. At the first step the XML is used to create to create a STL style text from the markers.

The result will be something like below:

00:00:00:00,00:00:00:04, Start
00:00:01:00,00:00:02:15, Marker 1
00:01:00:00,00:01:02:07, Marker 2
…

One important thing to mention is that markers are always on one line of text. So I did the "STL trick" to insert a "|" for every line break. And that is also the reason why the markers are exported as STL. In the following process the first "00:00:00:00,00:00:00:04, Start" is always ignored.

The movie and the STL file will be sent to the co-worker. He can use the information to make the the translation for example with an app like Jubler. He can also use just the movie and a spreadsheet app to make the translation.
When finished he sends back the spreadsheet file (exported as tab text).
Now the editor can use this STL and his FCP X XML to swap the marker text content using that time a little app I wrote. Now it is included in XTI.
Importing the XML into FCP X creates a duplicate of the original "select project". Working in his final project he then copied the newly "markered" clips to his timeline.
That was his workflow.

Another workflow could be to edit the clips from the event in their own timeline and adding markers there. Then export the event as XML and each clip as movie or all together as one movie.
Once the translation is done replace the markers import the event again.
XTI doesn't care about the TC in this case – it's only the order of appearance.

During the different states of the "final" edit you always can export a XML of the timeline and use XTI to convert the markers to "real" subtitles.

Drawback of this method: you have way to much chapters. Good thing; your subtitles travel with your edit without covering a lane.

There is another thing I was asked for. It was importing XLS files. It is complicated to run thru all the sheets which might be there to find the right one. But I decided to make a .csv file import possible. It is restricted to standard .csv format. Some apps do use ";" instead of "," as delimiters (which is not good) – so you have to replace the semicolons in a text editor upfront.

- Andreas

www.spherico.com/filmtools/TitleExchange/XTI/XTI.dmg