edit-handoff

Edit Handoff

"Can I finish this in Premiere?" is a handoff, not a render. The job is to move the tedious half of the edit — forty cuts on their true frames, each clip pointing at its real source, audio in sync — and to be exact about the half that does not move, because being vague there costs an editor an afternoon.

Requires

pip install 'video-studio-engine[export] @ https://github.com/scrollmark/social-skills/archive/refs/heads/master.tar.gz' covers all three exporters (export_fcpxml, export_capcut, export_edit); only export_edit needs the [export] bracket, for OpenTimelineIO. None is bundled — each reads the engine's timeline document and composer directory. No install, no export. What survives is the judgement below, which applies to any OTIO or FCPXML handoff. Captions do not survive either — the composer draws them from the props — so video-studio burn_captions bakes them in as pixels, or writes an .ass.

Which Export, Which Application

Target	Script	Route
Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve	video-studio export_edit	.otio, imported natively — no plugin
Final Cut Pro	video-studio export_fcpxml	.fcpxml 1.9, opens as a real project
CapCut	video-studio export_capcut --install	overwrites draft_info.json in an existing project
Any of them, another machine	add --bundle	copies the media in beside the timeline

video-studio export_edit --project <dir>

Always pass --project. It rebuilds that project's timeline first. The composer's props document is global, so exporting unbuilt silently emits whichever video was rendered last — a wrong file that looks entirely correct.

There is no .prproj writer and there should not be one: Premiere's format is undocumented, versioned to the application, and a reverse-engineered writer breaks silently inside someone else's edit. Adobe's supported inbound paths are OTIO, FCP7 XML, AAF and EDL. FCPXML is the opposite case — Apple publishes it, which is why Final Cut gets a direct writer.

What Travels

Survives everywhere: every cut at its true frame, each clip linked to its real source file, per-scene narration, music, and the captions as a sidecar .srt (Premiere imports it as a caption track).

Does not survive the generic path: camera moves, fades, and the on-screen cards. This is not a gap in the exporter — the interchange formats carry no effects at all; OTIO's own matrix marks effects unsupported across EDL, FCP7 XML, FCP X and AAF alike. So cards are written as timeline markers carrying their text at the frame where each appeared, and camera moves are marked the same way. The editor does not get the title; they get a labelled spot saying what belonged there.

Final Cut is the exception worth naming. export_fcpxml writes cards as real <title> elements on Final Cut's Basic Title generator and camera moves as keyframed <adjust-transform>, both editable in the inspector. Measured on a real project, the generic OTIO→FCPX adapter emitted zero of each. If the cards matter and the editor is on Final Cut, use this path.

CapCut Wants an Empty Project First

Ask the user to create one in CapCut itself (File > New Project, save, add nothing) and hand over the path. The script will not create the folder. A real project carries a dozen undocumented sibling files — draft_meta_info.json, draft_settings, Resources/, matting/ — that only CapCut knows how to write, and a folder missing them appears in the drafts list and does nothing when clicked. Cards do not travel here either.

Anti-patterns

• Exporting without --project. The failure is silent and ships the wrong video.
• Saying "it exports the whole video". It exports the cut. Effects are rebuilt.
• Promising cards on the OTIO path. They arrive as markers. Only FCPXML carries them.
• Claiming app-tested. The FCPXML is validated by parsing its own output, not by opening it in Final Cut. Say which one you mean.