Sales and Support FAQ

Question

Answer

It is possible that one of your log note fields contains an illegal character. In Final Cut you might see the message "XML Translation was aborted due to a critical error." and in CatDV you might see something like "Loading file.xml failed (Illegal XML character: .)".

This issue can occur both when exporting an XML file from CatDV and importing it into Final Cut Pro or when going the other way. (It can even occur if you export a file from Final Cut and then try to import it again, so it's not specifically a CatDV issue.)

Most characters (including foreign accented characters) are transferred ok but it is possible than a non-printing character that isn't valid inside an XML file may be present.

If this occurs you can try editing the file in a text editor to find and even remove the bad characters (make a copy of the file first!). To see which line the error(s) occurred on you need to look at the console.log file (Final Cut) or CatDV Error Log file (in ~/Library/Logs) for CatDV.

An even better approach than fixing the XML file is to correct the error in the original clip's log notes and then re-export the file as follows:

1. Select all the clips in the catalog and export as a Final Cut XML file
2. Open the result file in a text editor (such as Text Edit.app)
3. Look for the sequence &# (followed by a number and semicolon).
4. Refer back to the original clips and try and correct the error, eg. by deleting any extra spaces at the end of the text.

26/1/07