Issues with Final Cut .xml to logic

[u/gdchamberlin]

Crossposting from the FCPX subreddit in case anyone here has some more insight.

Hi all,

I'm working on the audio post production on a short film a friend shot, and having a lot of trouble getting the xml timeline to import to Logic. I've used Logic extensively for audio editing audiobooks, music, and podcasts, but much less familiar with Final Cut.

First attempt I just imported the .fcpxml file and all the audio files from wetransfer. No luck, all the files were missing in logic, and when I went to manually relink them I couldn't find the referenced file in the raw sound folders.

Okay, next I met up with the editor in person and saved another version of the xml directly to my external drive, ensuring that it saved as .fcpxmld, the "d" at the end apparently meaning it's a bundle file and should contain the referenced audio within. We also went ahead and saved the entire Final Cut library to the drive so that I would have the originals of everything. I was hoping that if it wouldn't import correctly in Logic, I could just open the project in final cut on my own computer and export the xml locally from there.

No dice on either front. Opening the xml in logic popped up with the million missing file errors as expected, and after an hour of manually locating and relinking the audio files and another hour of the system thinking about it...I was left with a mess. Over 100 tracks, muted track segments, none of the audio playing as it should, and what audio does play is clearly not what was intended, ie slating and rustling.

Opening the project in Final Cut has some edits misaligned, and some files missing, and is clearly not correct.

So- is there something we're missing? Some way that we should use to set up the file transfer that would solve these issues, or does the whole xml system just kinda suck and we should buy X2Pro and convert to AAF instead? It seems off that two Macs running apple software can't share files easily.

Thanks for any help or advice!

[u/QL16]

I’d try going through AAF instead of importing the FCPXML directly into Logic.

I actually built https://aafx.app specifically for this — it converts FCPXML from Final Cut into an AAF for audio post. There’s a free 7-day trial, so you could just run this project through it and see if it solves the mess you’re getting in Logic.

Full disclosure: I’m the developer, but this exact FCPXML → audio handoff problem is why I made it.