Convert a Final Cut Pro timeline to Vegas?

dwoodie wrote on 6/19/2006, 10:20 AM
I work in a small research lab and have used Vegas (v. 5) on my Wintel platform to produce some small basic videos for our facility. To help out with this we hired a recent video productions grad to work for us and he did all of his work in Final Cut Pro. He has now moved on and I have a hard drive setup with all of his FCP work (clips, pictures, and FCP timelines) that I need to perform some small edits on to update a few points in the videos. Is there any conversion program that will allow me to import the FCP timelines into Vegas? I had heard at some point about a program that would do that but have not found anything on the web. All I have seen is a few smatterings of mention about the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) but not specific information on how to get something to convert the FCP timeline into an AAF format that Vegas 6 can read (a reason to upgrade from version 5 I guess).

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks

Dan

Comments

Former user wrote on 6/19/2006, 10:27 AM
Depending upon what your changes are, you might be better to output the video as it exist now to a QT or AVI file and import that into Vegas and make your edits.

Chances are, any effects (keys, chroma key, type etc) will not translate to Vegas. The only translation will be the Timecode and edits.

Dave T2
GlennChan wrote on 6/19/2006, 11:46 AM
IIRC, FCP can't export AAF unless you have Automatic Duck. And then even in that case, only the basics will get converted... cuts + dissolves and a few other things.

Moving projects between editing platforms has been tricky the few times I've tried it. You might be best off making changes in FCP.

Other options:
1- EDL out from FCP sort of works...?
2- You can try all the flavours of EDL and XML from FCP.
3- You could print to tape (DV), and capture with Scenalyzer which will detect all the cuts.
4- You could strip the titles and export a file (quicktime or AVI) into Vegas. DV AVI might be a good choice for good performance.
MarkWWW wrote on 6/19/2006, 11:50 AM
The program you have heard of is almost certainly "Automatic Duck" which you can find here.

Automatic Duck will allow you to convert the FCP projects into an AAF version that Vegas can import. But there are a few problems with this approach. (1) Automatic Duck runs only on a Mac. If you don't have access to a Mac but only have the FCP data on a hard disk then you aren't going to be able to use this approach. (2) Like Mac programs always seem to be, Automatic Duck is rather pricey, too pricey to be worth buying for just one project I would think. (3) I'm not sure if you would be able to import the AAFs into your version of Vegas - it will work in Vegas 6 but I don't know if Vegas 5 has this ability.

Mark
winrockpost wrote on 6/19/2006, 1:36 PM
if they are just small edits, just do them in FCP,, never hurts to learn another program .