Export all captions as frame grabs in fcpx

I know this is a long shot, but I wonder if it's possible.


I learned a great technique of putting captions on my raw interviews and using that as a way to speed up editing. Instead of listening to a whole clip, I know what it is from a glance. So I can scrub through the timeline, and find things I know are there much faster.


To take the technique even further - see attached image


I'd like to export ALL the captions as stills from the FCPX timeline, and organize them as slides in Keynote. This helps me swap ideas around in the film like the old way of writing up index cards and spreading them over my floor.


In an ideal world, I would love to automatically export every caption with its accompanying still frame, as a slide, in a sequence. I could then import them into keynote, or as an album in Photos, and rearrange to my heart's content. After doing that I would go back and manually rearrange the clips to match what I did in the image form.


I have also done this with clients, it's a blast when working with a researcher or someone who is not a film editor but is used to text. When they really want to keep their hands on the ideas and I want to reduce all the pain of communicating with them through an edit, especially when we're remote from one another.


They just fart around with the slides, cut things out, and then send it back to me to cut and then i show them a draft together. It also helps me and them from becoming bored with the material.


MacBook Pro 15″

Posted on Oct 20, 2023 4:10 PM

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2 replies

Oct 21, 2023 8:55 AM in response to flick harrison

There does not seem to a command to move the playhead to the next caption, but here is a workaround that appears to be working in my limited testing. It requires a little preparation.


Preparation:

1) Add markers at each caption position. This can be done relatively easily. Open the Timeline Index, click Captions. Then it is just a matter of clicking on each caption in the Index and pressing M - click, M, click, M....


2) (If necessary) create a destination to save current frame, and choose the desired format (png, jpg...)


3) Make that destination the default, so it can be triggered from the keyboard with Command-E


4) Press Command-E and choose a folder. This will be where the automatic exports will be saved. You don't actually have to export anything now.


With that preparation done, you need only run the Applescript below.

The only thing you need to adjust is the number of frames to export (I put in 10 as a placeholder)



Export all captions as frame grabs in fcpx

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