One of the “legacy” items that editors miss when switching to Final Cut Pro X is the batch export function. For instance, you might want to encode H.264 versions of numerous ProRes files from your production, in order to upload raw footage for client review. While FCP X can’t do it directly, there is a simple workaround that will give you the same results. It just takes a few steps.
Step one. The first thing to do is to find the clips that you want to batch export. In my example images, I selected all the bread shots from a grocery store commercial. These have been grouped into a keyword collection called “bread”. Next, I have to edit these to a new sequence (FCP X project) into order to export. These can be in a random order and should include the full clips. Once the clips are in the project, export an FCPXML from that project.
Step two. I’m going to use the free application ClipExporter to work the magic. Launch it and open the FCPXML for the sequence of bread shots. ClipExporter can be used for a number of different tasks, like creating After Effects scripts, but in this case we are using it to create QuickTime movies. Make sure that all of the other icons are not lit. If you toggle the Q icon (QuickTime) once, you will generate new self-contained files, but these might not be the format you want. If you toggle the Q twice, it will display the icon as QR, which means you are now ready to export QuickTime reference files – also something useful from the past. ClipExporter will generate a new QuickTime file (self-contained or reference) for each clip in the FCP X project. These will be copied into the target folder location that you designate.
Step three. ClipExporter places each new QuickTime clip into its own subfolder, which is a bit cumbersome. Here’s a neat trick that will help. Use the Finder window’s search bar to locate all files that ends with the .mov extension. Make sure you limit the search to only your target folder and not the entire hard drive. Once the clips have been selected, copy-and-paste them to a new location or drag them directly into your encoding application. If you created reference files, copying them will go quickly and not take up additional hard drive space.
Step four. Drop your selected clips into Compressor or whatever other encoding application you choose. (It will need to be able to read QuickTime reference movies.) Apply your settings and target destination and encode.
Step five. Since many encoding presets typically append a suffix to the file name, you may want to alter or remove this on the newly encoded files. I use Better Rename to do this. It’s a batch utility for file name manipulation.
There you go – five easy steps (less if you skip some of the optional tasks) to restore batch exports to FCP X.
©2014 Oliver Peters
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