FCPX 11.1. 'Overwrite to Primary Storyline' Problem

I would still share the xml without flattening, but setting that aside: as you are, very sensibly, working on a copy of project, and want to flatten the timeline, at this point it seems that the course of action might be to delete any disabled clip that is at least partially “visible” when flattening occurs.

By the way, the xml needs to be converted afterwards, which makes me think if it may make sense to just export a master file in ProRes instead.

Overwrite To Primary Storyline has been the same since the beginning, it's not changed. I use it daily. It was always straight forward. But if you have disabled clips, when you duplicate the Project, just remove the disabled clips.

I had a chance to try this now (I was away from my Mac before).

The behavior that I see with Overwrite to Primary Storyline is (IMO) correct.

When you select some connected clips and choose the command to overwrite, the selected clips overwrite whatever is below and in the primary.

An example: clips B and C are selected and connected to the primary; B is disabled

Pressing Command-Option-DownArrow (or selecting Clip->Overwrite to Primary Storyline) we get:

The clips B and C overwrite whatever was below; and B is still disabled, as before running the command.

If I understood correctly, you would like disabled clips to be ignored, resulting instead (in this example) in

as if clip B had been nonexistent.

As far as I can tell, this is not the expected behavior, nor have I seen it work this way in previous versions (but I admit that this is not a command that I tend to use often).

"Collapse to Connected Storyline"

It doesn't do what you want, though. And it has some caveats. There's info in the user manual here.

Add storylines in Final Cut Pro for Mac - Apple Support

Larry Jordan does a good job of pointing out the caveats, it's at the end of this article.

https://larryjordan.com/articles/three-ways-to-organize-a-final-cut-pro-timeline

I don’t understand why you’d need to “flatten the project” in the first place… this is a destructive action: you can’t restore (unless if you immediately Undo) the project to its previous state.

Can you elaborate on what requirements led you to this unusual process?

Also, as far as I can tell, overwrite to primary storyline has not changed its behavior. It does what it says… overwrite.

But now any disabled clips in the upper layer overwrite enabled clips under them as a blank screen on the timeline.

That's correct behavior. Please understand that FCP's concept of "disable" when organizing the timeline is different from the "disable" concept used by the V key.

Three clips, ABC, are layered on the timeline. B is invalid with V key

The area that FCP considers invalid is framed in red.

All clips have been overwritten on the timeline.

Is there another way?!

Delete