cinemasetfreeImporting and exporting
Read and write FCPXML, FCP7 XML, AAF, ALE, CMX3600 EDL and OpenTimelineIO, plus .csfx, the lossless native bundle. Anything an export can't represent produces an explicit warning. It is never dropped quietly.
Formats
| Format | Goes to |
|---|---|
| FCPXML | Final Cut Pro, and DaVinci Resolve |
| FCP7 XML (xmeml) | Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve |
| AAF | Avid Media Composer |
| ALE | Avid bin metadata |
| CMX3600 EDL | Anything. The universal fallback. |
| OpenTimelineIO | Pipeline tools and anything OTIO-aware |
| .csfx | CinemaCutter itself. Lossless, nothing dropped |
The warning contract
Every interchange format loses something; that is the nature of them. An EDL cannot express a nested sequence; AAF and FCPXML disagree about effects. The usual result is that you export, open the file elsewhere, and discover what went missing.
Here, any fidelity loss produces an explicit warning naming what couldn’t be carried. Exports are also deterministic: the same timeline exports byte-for-byte identically every time, so a file can be diffed and a difference means a real change.
Use .csfx for anything you might come back to. It is the only format that loses nothing. The others are for handing work to somebody else’s application.