As you know 7toX is a very useful tool that allows editors to move their projects from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X. The tool is not perfect, but it gets the job done - even though sometimes you need to perform some additional actions. Scott Simmons of the Provideo Coalition wrote a very nice and long article on the tool and described how it works and what you should do to perform a successful convertion. He decided to use a big project to complicate things a little bit:

"The project I chose to throw at it was a music video that was cut from a live performance, a bit of music video specific performance and a ton of broll. It was a large job considering there was well over 10 hours of media. The performance itself was captured with 7 cameras and that includes rehearsals as well as the live performance. There were the odd GoPro placed around the stage. Add to that a few takes of the artist performing parts of the song to a track in a more abstract setting (I don’t have permission to show any of the footage or images) and that’s over 25 angles."

Scott wrote that several multiclips had to be made; some for the live performance, some for the rehearsal. He made a number of sync maps for different things, labeled them with a color and sent them to PluralEyes for syncing. To get the XML he deselected everything in FCP7 and exported the XML which he ran through 7toX for Final Cut Pro. You need to remember however, that the conversion takes some time - it took 7toX 15 minutes to process the 17MB XML created by Scott.

After 13 minutes FCPX finished importing the .fcpxml file: 

"Then I had a new Event in FCPX with a lot of events and a lot of media. (...) As I looked around in FCPX I found all my master clips, quite a few Compound Clips that represented my sequences from FCP7 (in an event called FCP7 Sequences) as well as new to 10.0.3 Multicamera Clips. I then opened up my final timeline by editing the Compound Clip into a timeline and choosing Break Apart Clip Items. (...) I was stunned that it came across so well. Almost everything is there in this rather insane timeline. Multicamera clips, the master audio, both enabled and disabled clips. It wasn’t 100% as there were some clips that were out of sync but for the most part it worked. And that was a lot of DSLR media and we all know DSLR media isn’t the best when it comes to timecode. Was the “fidelity” 100%? Nope but it’s a conversion that Intelligent Assistance should be proud of because this wasn’t an easy project to convert."

The biggest problem observed by Scott came from the scratch audio on all the cameras but it was rather a problem with FCPX, not the 7toX tool.

"All the clips imported into the FCPX timeline with camera audio intact while that camera audio had been removed from the FCP7 sequence. This is one of those fundamental differences between the applications and points to FCPX’s weakness in handling audio overall."

What Scott needed to do was select more than one clip at a time in the FCPX timeline and just turn the Volume down all the way.

Scott believes that people shouldn't expect prefect fidelity when moving between the applications. "The guys at Intelligent Assistance should be proud of themselves as they’ve done what Apple couldn’t / wouldn’t do."

For more thoughts on the conversion and the whole article with pictures follow this link.

Source: http://provideocoalition.com