Post-production handoff

From shot log to a Premiere timeline

An XML export is not a copy of your footage. It is a small text file that describes a timeline, in the standard your editing app already reads, and points at files that already exist on a drive. This is what that file actually contains, why the export builds two passes instead of one, and what happens when you open it.

One file, built for how Premiere already reads

The export is legacy FCP7 xmeml (version 5), the format Premiere Pro has read natively since long before Adobe owned it. That choice is deliberate: xmeml is old enough that every version of Premiere still in use opens it without a plugin or a conversion step, so the file you get at wrap is the file you drag in, nothing else to install.

Free accounts get 2 Premiere XML exports; the PDF and CSV handoffs described further down are separate allowances. Logging takes itself stays unlimited either way.

The timeline structure

Every export, single-camera or multi-camera, lays the same two-pass structure onto the sequence:

Band 1GOLD and good takes only, back to back, in story order (scene, then shot, then take). This alone plays close to a rough assembly.

— a few seconds of gap —

Band 2Every take, good and rejected, in the same story order again, as a selects pool. A take that was good sits in both bands.

The point of building it this way rather than one flat bin is that the timeline itself tells you where to look. Scrub the front of it and you are watching the assembly the set thought it had. Cross the gap and you have every alternate and every rejected attempt at the same shots, in the same order, without opening a browser panel and hunting for them.

What rides on each clip: markers

Every moment tapped on set, a beat, a GOLD flag, a spoken note, lands as a marker on the clip at the exact frame it happened, not as a separate row in a spreadsheet you have to cross-reference. The marker's name is built from the shot code, the tag, and the label, in that order: a GOLD moment on shot 5.31 reads on the timeline as 5.31 GOLD the look. Nothing gets inferred; if the take was not scoped to a shot the code is simply blank, and the marker still carries whatever tag and label it had.

Multi-camera: synced tracks, not a flattened cut

On a multi-camera project (two to four units), every camera gets its own picture-and-audio track pair, unit A on V1/A1, unit B on V2/A2, and so on. Every take places each camera's clip at the exact same timeline position across those tracks, so the angles stack vertically in sync and the sequence is ready for Premiere's own multicam tools the moment it opens, rather than needing to be synced by hand from scratch.

Production sound, if the project uses a separate recorder, rides its own additional audio track underneath the camera tracks, placed at the take's start plus whatever offset that take's sound clip actually started at. The editor relinks the recorder's file once and it already sits in sync under the picture.

Media relinking: a footage root, or a bare file name

The export writes a path for every clip, and which kind of path depends on one setting. Give the project a footage root, the folder on the editing machine the footage will actually live in, and every clip's path points straight into it, so the import can land fully online with no relinking at all. Leave it blank and the export falls back to the bare file name only, the same name the camera wrote to the card, which imports offline but relinks in one pass with “locate, relink others automatically by file name.”

The one exception is the cross-day collision covered in camera clip naming conventions: when the same bare file name genuinely belongs to two different physical cards from two different shoot days, the export pushes both into a dated reel folder instead, so a blind filename match can never bind the wrong day's clip.

Why a good take does not duplicate your bin

A take that made GOLD appears twice on the timeline, once in the story cut, once again in the selects pool. Writing that naively, one new imported clip per appearance, is a real and common failure mode: an editor bringing in a 232-clip shoot without this safeguard has watched an import land 351 separate items in the bin for those 232 physical files, each duplicate needing to be relinked and consolidated by hand.

The export avoids it by keying every clip reference on the timeline back to the physical file, not to the clip's appearance, so a take that shows up in both bands still resolves to a single item in the project panel. You get one clip, referenced twice on the timeline, which is what actually happened on set.

Importing it

Import
Drag the exported .xml straight into a project panel bin, or use File > Import. It lands as a new sequence carrying the project's name, with every clip referencing the card's native file name.
Relink
Locate one clip by hand, then choose the option to relink the rest automatically by file name. With no footage root set, this is the step that brings the whole card online in one pass.
Check the two bands
Scrub past the gap and confirm the selects pool is there, then trim it out of the delivery cut once the editor has pulled what they need from it.

CSV and PDF: when you want data, not a timeline

Not every handoff needs a sequence. The CSV export is one row per tapped moment, plus one row per take that has zero moments so an untouched take still shows up, with every field a spreadsheet-minded assistant editor could want:

scene, shot, take, date, clip, camera, operator, sound_file,
status, kind, tag, label, in_clock, out_clock, in_tc, out_tc,
camera_in_tc, camera_out_tc, wall_in, wall_out, duration_ms, note,
file_path, file_status, file_alternatives

The PDF export is built for production and the director rather than the edit bay: scenes, shots, clip numbers, durations, camera and wall-clock timecode, a GOLD summary up front, and the discarded takes at the back where they belong.

Before you export at wrap

Set the footage root once you know where the drive will actually sit on the edit machine, if you know it before wrap.
Get the project's frame rate right before you shoot, not after: changing it later reshapes the frame math for every export from that point on, but does not rewrite anything already exported.
Confirm with the editor that Premiere is what they are cutting in. The export is built for Premiere's own xmeml reader, not a general-purpose interchange file.

Same log, three formats

Clapper builds this from the shot log you already kept

Log takes on your phone as you shoot, mark GOLD and circle selects with a tap, and Clapper numbers your camera clips to match the card automatically. At wrap, export a Premiere timeline built exactly the way this page describes, plus a PDF shot log and a CSV of every take.

Open Clapper →