Hi Rainer!
Actually there isn't any way to get the selection in the timeline. A few folks have managed to create apps that appear to have knowledge of the play head location from the Mackie Control Universal protocol.
When asked about getting TC information from the FCP timeline via 'Mackie Control Universal', here's what we said in 2007 (which should work as well today): We use MIDI as a transport to talk to control surfaces, which converse with us in MIDI events. We speak to the surfaces using the "Mackie Control Universal" protocol owned by Mackie. Note that while MIDI timecode are realtime MIDI events, they are not part of the Mackie Control Universal protocol
The MCU protocol does _not_ include any timecode information. The MCU is purely a passive device, and it has a set of LCDs which we send text to. We send a textual representation of the current timeline's timecode if the user has selected timecode, but it is only loosely synchronized to actual playback; it's driven off of our UI playhead notification, and is thus delivered on the main thread "a long time" (in "real timecode" terms) after the actual timecode has passed by, and frames can quite easily be dropped from the notification.
For display purposes, it is "good enough", but it's nowhere near good enough to drive slaving a device, nor for generating MTC or LTC off of. You need accurate timing signal, generated off the actual playback threads, to generate reliable MTC or LTC. Furthermore, tying into the control surface interface would mean he'd have to parse the MCU stream coming through, and I'm not sure what he'd do when he sees something other than timecode text (say feet+frames or frames); also I would imagine it would mean a lot of configuration and confusion on behalf of the users, as to why this device would have to appear as a control surface.
The only way I know of that this could be accomplished today would be via a dedicated audio channel, and an AudioUnit that generates LTC (I've written one in the past, so I know it's possible). If the device in question had a USB interface to it from the computer, then that interface could include an USB audio class device that exposed a single channel, and that channel could consume the LTC and generate MTC (or whatever).
Then again, if it's just for display purposes, maybe emulating a MCU device would be good enough...
You'll have to look to Mackie for documentation of the protocol if you want to go this route.
Best Luck! Helena
On 2010-04-21, at 9:07 PM, Rainer Standke wrote: Hi Helena, you said so a couple of times before... and I even remember that ;-) So how can one find out about the midi support? Rainer On Apr 21, 2010, at 17:53 , Helena Ju wrote: Hey Rainer,
Please kindly keep in mind that whatever consensus folks may reach on this forum, it isn't really ideal for giving the Final Cut Pro engineering team feedback. There are several options for the latter including bugreporter.apple.com and within Final Cut, the 'Provide Final Cut Pro feedback' menu item under the 'Final Cut Pro' menu.
When there are many voices clambering for anything on this mailing list for a feature, that reaches a different audience than the feedback through proper channels.
Now with that being said, I know some have gotten this information via our midi control interface support in FCP but I believe that is a bit of a scary hack.
Cheers!
Helena
On 2010-04-21, at 4:32 PM, Rainer Standke wrote:
Wouldn't it be good if one could learn a little more about the sequence when our apps get an XML from FCP? I would be interested in two specific things:
- the current position of the vertical line, whatever that's called (position indicator?), in frames
- what clipitems might be selected, as in highlighted, maybe by way of a tag like <selected>TRUE</selected>.
Any thoughts on this? This can't be achieved otherwise, right?
Thanks,
Rainer _______________________________________________
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