Thursday, September 10, 2009

Final Cut Pro - Backwards/Forwards Compatibility

I've been working on a video for my SS10 collection and I have Final Cut Pro v.5.1.4 on my laptop. For those of you who don't know, FCP is a video editing software.

Anyway, a friend of mine did some color-correcting on the video on his machine, which has FCP6. When I tried to open the file again on my computer, it wouldn't work because FCP is not BACKWARDS compatible. Now, it's forwards compatible, meaning you can open an older file in later versions, but not backwards versions.

I'm posting this because I learned the hard way how to deal with this problem, and I hope this post can be helpful to someone else. You can export the file as an XML from the newer version to open it in an older version, but you have to make sure you use the correct XML VERSION. So my friend exported it in XML v.4 but it wouldn't open on my laptop. What I figured out later was that it had to be XML v.3 for my version of FCP.

Here is a chart that I grabbed from Creative COW which tells you which XML versions work with which versions of FCP. Once I exported an XML v.3 at my old workplace, Magnet Media, which has FCP7, I was able to open the file once again.

FCP4 supports XML version 1 only
FCP5 supports XML versions 1 and 2
FCP5.1 supports XML versions 1, 2 and 3
FCP6 supports XML versions 1, 2, 3 and 4

Hopefully this never happens to you.

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