I'm Andrew Arrow, a developer and Final Cut Pro user. My history with FCP goes back years and years, I tried to be a video editor as a career but ended up a software developer. I purchased the full version of the software a long, long time ago. And to Apple's credit, every single time I goto the App Store on any mac I still have access to download it. I must have been through 20, 30? I don't know, but a lot of macs over the years. Just recently I downloaded it again and noticed the XML Export feature.

Wow. There's a lot of stuff there. I mean a lot. I started playing around with generating the XML and that has lead to this project.

https://github.com/andrewarrow/cutlass/blob/main/README.md

Read through those go structs and xml tags. Keep going. And going. It just never stops! It's a very sophisticated XML format that can describe any timeline, effect, or animation you can imagine. Apple's documentation is scattered, the XML is notoriously finicky, and one wrong attribute crashes your import.

And of course with Claude Code (or others, pick your favorite AI) you can have your AI write some amazing things in go using cutlass.

```go // Generate a timeline with precise keyframe animations

video := fcp.Video{

    Ref: assetID,

    Offset: "0s", 

    Duration: fcp.ConvertSecondsToFCPDuration(10.0),

    AdjustTransform: &fcp.AdjustTransform{

        Params: []fcp.Param{{

            Name: "position",

            KeyframeAnimation: &fcp.KeyframeAnimation{

                Keyframes: []fcp.Keyframe{

                    {Time: "0s", Value: "0 0"},

                    {Time: "240240/24000s", Value: "100 50"},

                },

            },

        }},

    },

So I haven't been writing code like that with my human brain. I spend most of my time just telling Claude the video I want to create, and he uses the cutlass library to achieve it. I'm hooking up FCP directly to Claude. A different kind of AI Video generation.

Would love feedback, thanks for reading this far! -aa