This one has taken a while, but it looks like Apple has finally documented the Motion XML format. It’s been fairly easy to reverse-engineer, but now if you’ve got questions or gotchas you know where to look to find out what the deal should be.
The section on Modifying Text is especially useful for day to day hacking.
Apple posted some interesting sample code called TimelineToTC that takes a Sequence XML file and returns a basic edl file of the selected attributes. Not very full featured, as is typical of Apple sample code, but is a good starting place for someone looking to do conversion work or a more full featured edl. Worth a look especially for a nicely packaged function/method called FormatTimecode which takes a frame count and returns a formatted time code string accounting for drop and non-drop frame sequences. handy.
So… if you’ve landed here, you might be asking what exactly is a creative workflow hack?
Hacks in this case are tips, tricks, scripts and other helpful tidbits that address real-world problems that arise in creative environments. These are “helpful” hacks, not “leet haxorz” cracker stuff, although with the popularity of the Oreilly hacks
You might be in good company if you don’t care
If you have any ideas or questions about how to improve your workflow, give me a shout at dale(at)creative-workflow-hacks(dot)com and I’ll try to post solutions and ideas. Let’s get started.