Turning the project into a file.
ClapperBoard writes two quite different things. A finished video file — a movie or a GIF, settled and flat — and a Final Cut Pro project, which is the same timeline still taken apart, for finishing the job in an editor. The settings below govern the first, and most of them govern the second as well.
They live under Render options, at the right-hand end of the control bar, and they belong to the project and are saved with it.
| Format | Notes |
|---|---|
| MPEG-4 | The default. The most portable choice — it plays essentially everywhere. |
| QuickTime Movie | Same picture, in a QuickTime container. |
| Animated GIF | No sound. A GIF cannot carry an audio track, so any audio in the project is left out. |
The two video formats are written with an audio pass after the picture is finished; GIF skips that pass entirely, which is why a GIF export finishes sooner.
VGA 640 × 480, qHD 960 × 540, HD 720p, Full HD 1080p, Ultra HD 4K, and 8K. Full HD is the default.
The frame shape here also sets what you see in the preview, and it is what Fit to frame measures against when splitting a score into staff systems. Changing it later changes both.
24, 30, 60 or 120 frames per second, defaulting to 30.
For a project of held pages, frame rate makes very little difference to what anyone sees — nothing is moving between page turns — so there is rarely a reason to raise it. For stop-motion it is the opposite: the frame rate is what decides how long one frame lasts, and it pairs with the frame-length setting in the stop-motion options.
A page sitting on screen for thirty seconds does not need nine hundred identical frames written into the file. ClapperBoard can write one long frame instead, and seek precision is the longest single frame it is allowed to write — the ceiling on how much identical picture gets collapsed into one.
The trade is export time against scrubbing:
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| 0.5 s (highest) | Finest scrubbing in the finished file, slowest to export. |
| 1 s (high) | |
| 2 s (medium) | The default, and a reasonable balance. |
| 3 s | |
| 4 s (fastest export) | Quickest export, coarsest scrubbing. |
Coarse settings pay off most on projects made of long held pages, which is exactly where a read-along or a score sits. If dragging through the finished video feels like it snaps rather than glides, that is this setting, and a lower number will fix it at the cost of a longer export.
Seek precision affects only the exported file. It changes nothing about playback inside ClapperBoard, and nothing about the timing of your pages.
What fills the frame around an image that does not match the frame's shape. White, black, three greys, or any colour you like through the colour picker. It shows in the preview as well as the export, so what you see while editing is what you get.
Press ⌘E, or use the export button in the toolbar. The button fills with progress as it goes, and the toolbar names the stage: rendering the picture first, then preparing and merging the audio.
⌘. cancels, here and for a Final Cut Pro export alike. When the render finishes, ClapperBoard asks where to save.
Long projects take a while, and the picture pass is the slow half. If you are experimenting rather than producing a final file, a coarser seek precision and a smaller resolution will get you something to look at much sooner.
File › Export to Final Cut Pro writes the project as an editable timeline rather than a finished film. Every page arrives on Final Cut's own timeline as a separate clip at the duration you gave it, with the audio on its own connected lanes — so the timing, the levels and the cuts can all be worked on there.
Reach for it when ClapperBoard has done the part it is good at — the pages, the crops, the sync to a narration — and the rest of the job belongs somewhere else: colour, titles, a music mix, cutting the result into a longer programme.
ClapperBoard asks you to name a folder, and writes two things into it: an .fcpxml file, and a Media folder holding everything the timeline points at.
Each page is baked to a still image at the project's export resolution, with its crop, its overlays and the canvas colour already applied — the framing is finished, and Final Cut receives it as a picture rather than as instructions it might interpret differently. Pages that come out identical share one file, so a repeated page costs nothing. The audio files are copied across untouched.
Choose a real folder of your own rather than a temporary one. Final Cut is sandboxed and will not read media from a scratch location, and an import from one arrives with every clip missing.
| In ClapperBoard | In Final Cut Pro |
|---|---|
| Resolution and frame rate | The sequence's own format. |
| Page durations | Clip durations, snapped to the frame grid so nothing drifts over a long project. |
| Each audio lane | A connected lane of its own. |
| Lane level | A volume adjustment on the clips. |
| A muted lane | Its clips arrive disabled — present, and switched back on with one click. |
| Fades and crossfades | Opacity and volume ramps. |
| Page numbers from a PDF | Chapter markers, so the timeline can be navigated by page. |
| Crop, overlays, canvas colour | Baked into the stills. |
Because the framing is baked in, a page cannot be re-framed in Final Cut. That is the trade: cropping is the part you finished here, and timing and audio are the parts you went there for.
A crossfade with no page on the other side of it has nothing to blend into and is exported as a plain cut. The summary at the end says how many, if any.
In Final Cut Pro, choose File › Import › XML and pick the .fcpxml file. If that menu item is dimmed, there is no library open — create or open one and try again.
Final Cut copies the media into its own library as it imports, so the folder can be deleted once the import has finished.
This is a Final Cut Pro format. Premiere Pro cannot read it — its "XML from Final Cut Pro" import is a different, much older format. DaVinci Resolve reads the timeline correctly but will not link the media to it, and does the same with Final Cut's own exports, so that is not something this export can fix.
ClapperBoard is free to use, and free projects have no limits: every editing feature, any number of pages, any length. The limit is on the exported file.
Without a purchase, exports are watermarked and capped at 720p. Choosing a higher resolution is not an error — the export is scaled down to fit 720p, keeping its shape. The watermark is tiled across the whole frame, and appears over the preview during playback too, so there is never a surprise at the end of a long render.
One thing the free tier does not get at all is Export to Final Cut Pro. It hands over the pages as full-resolution, unwatermarked stills, so there is no reduced version of it to offer — it asks you to upgrade rather than producing something lesser.
Unlocking removes both limits and opens the Final Cut export. There are two ways to do it, and they are alternatives rather than steps:
Either can be bought from Upgrade ClapperBoard in the app menu, or from the offer that appears when you export without an entitlement. If you have bought before — on this Mac or another — use Restore Purchases in Settings rather than buying again.
Your entitlement is remembered, so exporting works normally offline. It is checked with the App Store when it can be, and a purchase made on one device carries to the others signed in to the same Apple Account.