Send to Final Cut Pro

One click and your paper edit, captions, and clip metadata land in Final Cut Pro.

This is the tightest export ReelChest has. Final Cut Pro gets a real FCPXML with our timeline, our clips, and any captions you've written.

Two flavors

There are two ways to send to FCP, and they do different things:

• From the Library: sends the clips you've selected to FCP's event browser, with our color labels, ratings, and tags attached. Good for handoff after curation. Hotkey: ⌘⇧E.
• From a Paper Edit or Mosaic workspace: sends the timeline, with every enabled clip in order, transforms, padding, and captions as editable title clips. Good for handoff after the cut is built.

When you trigger the Library send, if any of the selected clips have a ProRes proxy on disk, you'll get a submenu: Send Original or Send ProRes Copy. Send the proxy when the originals are heavy or the codec is awkward in FCP, send the originals when you want full quality. The proxy substitution is per-asset, so a mixed selection works fine.

What carries to FCP's event browser:

• File reference (the literal path)
• Color label (translated to a keyword that matches your label name)
• Rating: 4 stars and up = Favorite; below 4 = no Favorite mark
• Tags as keywords. The "Prefix imported FCP keywords with fcp:" Setting (Settings → Final Cut) controls whether tags get a fcp: prefix on the FCP side. Off by default; useful if you want to tell ReelChest-added keywords from your hand-typed FCP ones.

Both write a real FCPXML and ask FCP to open it. If FCP is already running with a library open, we detect it and import silently. If not, FCP shows its own picker.

Before we send

A few things to confirm so the import isn't messy:

• The project's frame rate matches your FCP library. Mismatched rates mean retiming, and retiming means quiet bugs later.
• Your media is in a stable location. FCP relinks by file path. If you move clips after exporting, FCP will need help finding them.
• Anything you've toggled off in the clip list won't make the export. Disabled rows are dimmed in the panel and skipped silently. There's no draft state to forget about.

Send the timeline

In Paper Edit or Mosaic, open Export, then Final Cut Pro. We write the FCPXML to a temp location, and ask FCP to open it.

Your timeline lands in FCP's library as a new event prefixed Paper - or Mosaic - so you can tell them apart. Drag the event into a project and you're editing. Each clip arrives with the in/out, padding, and any per-clip transforms you set on this side.

If a clip is offline, FCP will tell you. Right-click, Relink Files, point at the folder.

A note on captions

If your project has captions and you've left "Include subtitles" on, captions come across as editable title clips on a parallel track. Type, color, outline, shadow, and position all carry. One thing to know: the Glow checkbox doesn't survive the FCPXML format, so if you used Glow, FCP gets the color and radius pre-filled but the toggle off. Click each styled caption once in FCP's inspector to re-enable it. We surface a toast on export to remind you.

Premiere and Resolve

Different format. Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve get a legacy FCP7 XML file (xmeml), which is what they import cleanly. Captions ride along as a separate .srt file written next to the XML. See the next article for the full flow.

A working tip

Build your cut with everything enabled. When you're close, toggle off the rows you're not sure about and send a draft to FCP. Editors who use FCP know how to live in the timeline; we're just trying to get you in there fast.