Thanks for the kind words.

That way, I can look at the EDL from the FCP timeline, and just slip/slide the layers in AE to match the timecodes.

Your best bet to handle this kind of thing is to use FCP-XML. I’ve written a post about working with FCP-XML in AE via sripting.

Moving Between Final Cut Pro and After Effects: The Scripting Option

The timecodereader utility is handy for working with FCP timelines, but you need to do a bit of work via scriptiing to calculate from the first frame, so it helps to have some scripting experience to work with these tools.

Is this even possible using these hacks you came up with? Or do I still have to shell out the big bucks for a copy of Automatic Duck?

I’m a big fan of Automatic Duck, it’s a great piece of software. It’s definitely possible to do similar kinds of things with scripting, but you won’t be able to duplicate the seemless experience you get with such well designed software. I use scripts and hacks to develop custom workflows and project management solutions, but I still use Automatic Duck daily for project integration between AE and FCP.

I need to recreate a sequence which was cut in FCP in my AE comp (using the same media, of course). The media/sequence was consolidated with 30 frames of handles.

The timecodereader script only seems to return the timecode of the first frame of the .mov file. What I would like it to do is return the timecode number of the selected clip’s frame which is currently under the timeline cursor. That way, I can look at the EDL from the FCP timeline, and just slip/slide the layers in AE to match the timecodes.

Is this even possible using these hacks you came up with? Or do I still have to shell out the big bucks for a copy of Automatic Duck?