 Do you make a lot of YouTube videos? It's kind of ubiquitous now that YouTube videos come with these nice little chapter marks that you sort of need to go in and manually enter. Now you might be catching this video at a time where YouTube's automatically generated this but you also might like a little bit more control. By scrolling down into the description you can see that we can manually enter into these chapter marks but it's real pain in the butt having to generate this. Now if you're a solo YouTuber like me and you edit your own videos in Final Cut Pro I'm going to show you a way that you can reduce the double handling of your work so that you can auto generate these chapter markers based on markers in Final Cut Pro that you're editing. All right, let's check it out in just a sec. Hey crew, it's The Surfing Scratcher here, teacher, server, programmer and on this channel I help curious learners just like you along on your learning journeys. Okay, so this video is all about Final Cut Pro exporting markers that you can make on the timeline for YouTube chapters. Now there's a couple of things that I've just got to mention about this video. It's still not the perfect solution but it's nearly there. So what are those two things? Well, the first thing is that when we make marker timestamps in Final Cut Pro that we need to manually enter in the time code. So what do I mean by that? Well, let's jump over to YouTube. You can see here that we've got a timestamp here so we need to manually enter these into the marker. I haven't figured out a way to read this data yet but I'm sure there is a way and let me know down in the description if you know how to do that. The second thing is that we're going to be using a program called Replit. Now Replit is just a development environment that's online and the only caveat here is that you just need to sign in with a Google account to be able to use this. I haven't got around to hosting this file on my own website but hopefully by the time you watch this video there'll be a link down in the description for that so go and check it out in the description. Okay, so let's jump into Final Cut Pro and I'll show you the steps of what we need to do. Okay, so I'm just over here in Final Cut Pro in one of my projects. You can see I've got quite a few projects going on down here and we've got the timeline and on the timeline we can go in and we can make some markers. So you can make a marker. I'm sure you already know how to do that by pressing M on the keyboard. Pressing M again brings up a little dialog window here. Okay, I'm just gonna go ahead and delete that. If you click the index over here and you highlight the tags and the markers here it will create a catalog of all those markers. Now unfortunately if you right click on these nothing happens, there's no way to export this. Sure you could manually go in and type this into a text editor if you wanted to but again that's just adding an extra step into the process and it's quite a long process as it is so this is just that repetitive work that you don't really wanna have to do. But I know that when I create my screen casts then I put them into Final Cut Pro. I've gotta go through this and edit it anyway just to make sure everything is sounding okay. Everything is sequenced right. So it would make sense that as I'm going through this process I could just go in and add more markers along the way. And that's exactly what we're going to be doing. We can find some points that we're interested in. We can press M to create a marker and we could make a chapter marker here. Now here's the first little caveat of this video. What you'd need to do is go ahead and create the timestamp manually here. So I can just look down at this. This is 21 frames, 56 seconds and these are our minutes and hours. So I just need to type 0056 and a space there just to signify it is 56 seconds. Currently I haven't been able to find a way to read the XML data which I'll show you in just a sec to be able to read this number in the XML. I'm sure there's a way. Let me know down in the description if you know how to do that. So then I'm gonna click done here and you'll see that we've got a new chapter marker over here in our index. So we would go through this whole file and you would create markers where you would like them. Okay, so here's another marker. Let's put it at one minute and 59 seconds. I have no idea what this one's for so let's just call it Python. And there we go, I've got three markers. So what do we do with this now? Well let's just imagine I've gone through my timeline here and I've added in all my markers. What do we do next? Well what we do is we head up to file and we're now going to export the XML. And this is the XML of this final cut project. And let's just check out the settings here. So save it as a file name that reflects the project that you're working in. That makes sense. We're going to make the metadata for you. Just leave that as general. And the XML version, this is the important part. It needs to be set to version 1.9 on the previous version. Now you might be looking at this in the future and there might be some other versions down here. So just let me know if it's not working for you. But if you've got these two options, make sure 1.9 is selected. Then find the location where you're going to save it and let's save it. Okay, so what does that do? Well, let's go on and create this FCP XML file. This is just an XML file that I'm just going to open up onto the screen right now and let's not be scared by it. It's pretty gnarly, but yeah, look, there it is. And it's quite a large file but this is basically your final cut project as XML. Now you can use these XMLs to make your project available in Premiere Pro, for instance. There's a few use cases for this, but for us, we're interested in the market. So I'm just going to go Command F here and I'm going to type in marker. And you can see that we have got these tags of markers here and you'll see the value of that tag is in fact one of those markers that we've got in the final cut project. Sure, there's a start value here, but I mean, I haven't been able to find a really good way to interpret this start value like I'm not entirely sure what is going on here. So again, if you know, let me know down in the description and I will tidy up this file. So this is no good to us at the moment. This isn't the solution. What I've gone ahead and done is create a little program, a tiny program that basically just extracts all of these markers and it just outputs these values for us. So let me show you how to do that and go check the link down in the description. It's a link to this replet template that you're going to need to use and I'll just walk you through how to do that. Okay, so I've just got the link here in the address bar and I'm just working here as a guest just to simulate what you would probably be seeing as well. So I'm just going to hit enter on the keyboard and it takes us to this replet project which is pretty neat. I've got some instructions down here in the description. So if you want to read over those, go for it. But the key thing that you need to do here is you need to fork this replet. Okay, so I'm going to hit this button fork and it's going to ask you to sign in or log in. Now I recommend that you use your Google account because it's just the easiest way to go about it. I'm going to do that and I'll see you on the other side. You can either sign up for replet but if you don't intend using this to make some coding programs, like just signing with Facebook or Google, just do one of those. Okay, so I'm going to sign in and I'll see you on the other side. Okay, so you can see here that I've signed in and we just need to press this fork repl button over here in the top right hand corner. So I'll do that and that will create a copy of this project. Fantastic, okay. So you don't actually need to worry about any of this code down here. Let's just draw your attention over here to the left hand pane. You'll see here that there's a few files. You don't need to worry about this main.py. Just check out the scpxml underscore files. Now remember that file that you created before? That's this one, right? All you need to do is drag and drop that into that folder. Okay, so now if I expand this folder, you'll see that I've got that refactoring project and I can just go in and copy that. All right, you can see we've got that file. We don't need to worry about that. What we need to go ahead and do is go into the marker settings here and if you've got multiple chapters or multiple files here, you can just export them all. Just turn this to a value that says true. If this is set to true, it will just export any file that is in this scpxml underscore files folder. But if it's set to false and you just wanna export one of them, then just go ahead and change the file name to that file that you want to export. The last thing that you need to go ahead and do is just press run. So what that will do in the marker underscore files is output a chapters file. And you can see here that we've just got those chapters automatically exported. And now when you're creating your YouTube video, you can just copy and paste this into the description. So now that you've gone to all this effort to set up, why don't you go ahead and bookmark this replete so that you can use it in the future. Let's just recap the steps. So over here in Final Cut Pro, you wanna go through and create all of your markers. And when you create a marker at this stage, you just need to go through and make a timestamp. Hopefully down the track, I'll have figured out how to automatically read the timestamp here, so we won't need to do that. But for now, you'll need to manually enter that in. Then go ahead and export your XML file here of your project and save it into a familiar location. And then you wanna take that file and jump across to replete. And then upload it in the FCP XML underscore files folder. And you wanna switch the flag in the settings to either true, so export all of them or just change the file name. If you're running into some errors, just double check the name of the file name matches the one that is in here. So down the track, I hope to make this compatible with Premiere Pro users as well. Yes, automating those timestamps, you don't have to manually type them in would be a useful feature. And I reckon hosting this on a webpage to remove the replete dependency would also make everyone's life easier as well. So there you have it. I hope you found that useful. I hope that you can start to automate some of these chapter markers if you are that solo YouTuber like me doing it all on your own. Let me know how it went for you down in the comments but until next time, I'm off to go find a wave and I'll catch you sometime soon.