From shot log to a Premiere (or Resolve) timeline

Two formats, one shared allowance

“Export to Premiere” and “export to Resolve” are not the same file with a different label. They are two different generators writing two different XML dialects: the Premiere export is legacy FCP7 xmeml (version 5), the format Premiere Pro has always read natively. The Resolve export is FCPXML, the Final Cut Pro X interchange format, because that is the dialect DaVinci Resolve's own import tooling is built around. Feed Resolve the Premiere-shaped file, or Premiere the Resolve-shaped one, and you will get an import that only partly works, if it opens at all.

Clapper treats them as one handoff for the purpose of the free tier: exporting a Premiere XML and a Resolve XML both draw from the same pooled allowance, because it is the same underlying shot log going to the same editor either way, just shaped for a different app. Pick the one that matches the editor's software, not both by default.

The timeline structure, in both formats

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

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 or Resolve'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.

Both formats avoid it the same way: every clip reference on the timeline is keyed 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 or media pool. You get one clip, referenced twice on the timeline, which is what actually happened on set.

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:

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.
• Pick Premiere or Resolve to match the editor's app. They read different files, even though they share one free allowance.