Exporting capture logs to XML

Question

Greetings,
I work as a developer for a non-profit organization, Folkstreams (www.folkstreams.net), which streams documentary films on American folk culture over the internet. We are attempting to build a community of folk culture filmmakers around our site who integrate technology into their filmmaking in ways that help revive or enhance the use of media in recording and making folklore media more useful and accessible.
We hope to create a system where the raw footage left from the filmmaking process will be archived and an index of significant clips created and stored in a database. The clips would record start and end time of the video segment, along with an annotation and an index entry.
We see a possible first step to this process as asking filmmakers who use Final Cut Pro to create an index within the application and then submit their hard drives to the Southern Folklife Collection archive where our film masters are stored. We envisioned importing information about the video from Final Cut Pro into our database allowing researchers and others to search and mine the shot data as well as find relevant video segments.
We would like to ask filmmakers, when they decide to "capture" raw video segments from the camera to the hard drive, that they add a description of the segment. Each segment of captured video will be logged with time code and description. I am not that familiar with Final Cut Pro, but we would also like to associate a category with each captured clip if possible.
I am told it is possible to export a complete log of captured sections from Final Cut Pro to XML. We would like very much to import this to our database. Although there are a few expensive proprietary systems that enable annotating video and storing the information into a database, they leave the filmmaker out of the process, so we propose to develop our own. It is also easy to retain the raw footage by placing the hard drive in the archive. We envision capturing the filmmaker's thoughts and perceptions, making them transparent and available ,in order to maintain the importance of their role. It is also much more likely that the filmmaker will actually mark the segments than some random person the future.
Our people are filmmakers and I am a programmer so this issue falls into the gap between our areas of knowledge. If I can get the XML data, I can import it into a database structured for our purposes. Can someone point me to the documentation for the Final Cut Pro XML export format? I need to know what information is exported.
I've scanned the forums for XML questions but it is a little overwhelming.
Your help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Steve

Answer 1

Can someone point me to the documentation for the Final Cut Pro XML export format?
The Final Cut Pro XML Interchange Format info from Apple's Developer Connection should get you started.