If you used classic Final Cut Pro 7 for years then eventually moved to FCPX now what do you do when you want to restore an old project? Read on…

FCP7 to FCPX

In the beginning we set up an older iMac that had been sitting around and already had macOS 10.12 and Final Cut Pro 7 (and even an early version of FCPX). We used this iMac to open up old FCP7 projects from our projects archive which were restored from LTO tape archive created by Archiware P5.

This process of restoring from tape archive back to the SAN then copying to an external drive to attach to this older iMac to convert worked but was cumbersome and not convenient. Opening old projects in FCP7 and then exporting out the XML was easy. Using SendToX to convert to FCPX XML was also easy. But getting the project to this old Mac off the main network was a drag.

Use Retroactive app to install Final Cut Pro 7

Then one day I heard of this project that allowed to install iTunes on macOS 10.15 (Catalina) which only had the new Music app. Weird flex, but OK. Reading further it also allowed FCP7 to be installed on macOS 10.14 (Mojave)! Now this was a useful revelation. The app is called Retroactive and it would be very useful to us. Now FCP7 could be installed on the same Mac as FCPX. It would then have access to the network and the SAN where do all our editing and where we restore archive from LTO archive. Awesome.

The best part was that we moved from a dedicated old iMac running macOS 10.12 to a newer iMac Pro with macOS 10.14 on the Xsan and can run FCP7 thanks to that new app that makes it work. And then FCP7 to XML to sendtoX to FCPX is not too bad.

We also used Kyno to drill down into all the restored projects to identify en masse all the restored footage that it incompatible with FCPX. Renamed and then reconverted. All is well again for now. Archive restored, FCP7 projects converted to FCPX. Yeah, happy times.

Kyno batch rename

Kyno convert and transcode

We had one minor snag in the process. Some of the restored projects didn’t use FCP7 they used early versions of FCPX with their events and projects folders separated (not the current library structure). Latest version of FCPX 10.4 did not know what to do with these projects that were also some times stored on sparse disk images (oh how the Xsan did not like these projects at the time). There was a menu for a while to convert these projects but it was now gone. What to do?

Back to the old iMac and we used FCPX 10.2.3 to convert these projects from 10.0 version to 10.2.3 library which can then be converted to the latest FCPX 10.4 format. Almost easier to convert FCP7 to FCPX in one shot but it worked and we were happily editing old projects in the latest version of FCPX.

Editing old projects in new FCPX

We have a way to restore old projects from LTO tape thanks to Archiware P5, a way to identify, rename and bulk convert old footage in an easy fashion thanks to Kyno and now also a way to convert FCP7 with SendToX and Retroactive to make it more seamless.

Hope this helps anyone else if want to do the same thing good luck.