I use MS Excel for a lot of my scripting and animation. It helps me keep everything straight and organized, and prevents me from getting lost in a sea of cue points! One of the challenges I ran into when working on a recent project is getting my Final Cut Pro markers into an Excel spreadsheet so I can log my animation cues. After a quick search online, as usual, others have run into the same issue. Enter readXML to save the day.

With this project, I was converting video files to FLV files with embedded cue points. I was already exporting my markers to XML files so they could be converted to Flash cue points (using my new and improved conversion method - See my earlier post on ConvertCuePoints on how to do this), so all I needed to do was get them into a spreadsheet. This should be easy, right, just import the data using the “import” function of Excel? Nope.

readXML is a simple program created by Andreas Kiel that reads FCP XML files, and displays the information in an easy to read format. Then, it allows you to easily export clip and sequence information to your clipboard, so you can paste it into Excel.

Simple, easy, and useful. This tool helped me get the grunt work of marker conversion out of the way so I could concentrate on creativity. Oh, and the download is free! Thanks Andreas!

To download readXML, and for more information about the application, visit http://www.spherico.com/filmtools/readXML/index.html

This is just one of the excellent FCP time savers Andreas has on his website http://www.spherico.com/filmtools.