Research by Surreal Road

As far as I can tell, there is no “formal” (nor informal, for that matter) specification for a Final Cut Pro Batch List anywhere, despite being in regular use (this is unfortunately the case for several file types in regular use in post-production). FCP’s manual provides a few hints, but nothing completely definitive.

So here goes:

1. The first line of the batch file must contain the headings of the relevant fields, separated by tabs. These must be named precisely (see below for possible field headings).
2. The fields “Name”, “Media Start”, “Media End” and “Reel” are required.
3. The information for clips must be provided on one line per clip.
4. Folders in a project are defined on a line by starting with an asterisk (*), a space, and the folder name (e.g. “* AAA_cut_aways”). All clips listed after that label will be placed are in that folder. Strangely though, FCP seems to ignore these labels when importing a batch list.
5. The file must be plain text.

As of Final Cut Pro 6.0.3, any of the following field headings can be used:

• Name
• Duration
• In
• Out
• Media Start
• Media End
• Tracks - must be in the form “1V,2A” (for 1 video track and 2 audio tracks in this case)
• Good - “Yes”/”No”
• Log Note
• Label
• Label 2
• Audio
• Frame Size - must be in the form “pixel_width x pixel_height” (e.g. “1920 x 1080″)
• Vid Rate - must be in the form “25 fps”
• Compressor
• Data Rate - must be in the form “2048/sec”
• Aud Rate - must be in the form “96.0 KHz”
• Aud Format
• Alpha
• Reverse Alpha - “Yes”/”No”
• Composite
• Pixel Aspect
• Anamorphic - “Yes”/”No”
• Field Dominance - “Upper (Odd)” or “Lower (Even)”
• Description
• Scene
• Shot/Take
• Angle
• Reel
• Master Comment 1
• Master Comment 2
• Comment 1
• Comment 2
• Master Clip - “Yes”/”No”
• Offline - “Yes”/”No”
• Last Modified - Must be in the form “Tue, Mar 4, 2008, 17:19″
• Film Safe - “Yes”/”No”

Other things to note:

• Although many people are under the impression that right-clicking on a sequence and choosing Export->Batch List will produce a list that only contains clips used in the selected sequence, this is actually not the case. Exported batch lists will always contain all clips in the project.
• Exporting a batch list from FCP will only export field data for columns that are visible in the project. So if you have the “Master Comment 1″ column hidden, that data won’t get exported.
• The frame rate gets determined by the project that the list is imported into, and is not specified in the list directly.

UPDATE (07/April/09): It was brought to my attention that there is an issue with manually creating text files for Batch Lists. It seems that yet another requirement of the Batch List is that every line must be terminated by ASCII character 13 (rather than ASCII character 10). Not doing so will produce the error that one or more headings are invalid.

I have created an AppleScript that will convert files that are producing this error.

Batch List Text Conversion AppleScript