# Alternative Report Generator

![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Microsoft_Office_Excel_%282025%E2%80%93present%29.svg){width="250"}

[Production's Best Friend](https://www.intelligentassistance.com/productions-best-friend/) is, by a wide margin, the most established and widely trusted tool for generating professional reports from Final Cut Pro projects, developed by Intelligent Assistance. It has served the editorial community faithfully for many years, turning timelines into polished Excel spreadsheets covering roles, clips, markers, and much more, and remains a thoroughly capable choice for editors, coordinators, and producers alike.

What has been less common, however, is genuine alternative. For a tool so central to so many post-production workflows, there has historically been little in the way of choice, and fewer still options built on foundations that anyone is free to inspect, question, or build upon.

One way of approaching this same problem is from a different angle: building a tool on top of an [open-source FCPXML parsing engine](https://github.com/TheAcharya/OpenFCPXMLKit), such that the logic underpinning its reports is not a closed proposition. The engine beneath it is published openly, and anyone with the inclination is free to read it, question it, or extend it. There is no subscription to maintain, no recurring fee attached to continued use, and no sense that the tool exists to be gradually monetised further over time. Nor is there any gatekeeping of the underlying knowledge that makes the reporting possible in the first place.

This matters more than it might first appear. In a era where AI and [LLMs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model) have made it genuinely practical for an individual developer to fork an open framework and shape it into their own workflow tool, the barrier to building something bespoke has never been lower. A studio, a post house, or simply a curious user no longer needs to wait for a vendor's roadmap to align with their own particular needs. They can, if they choose, build it themselves.

There is a useful way to think about this. Imagine visiting a restaurant and being served a wonderful plate of food. You enjoy it enormously, and there is no reason you shouldn't return and order it again. But equally, there is nothing stopping you from going home afterwards and attempting to recreate that same dish yourself, using whatever ingredients and equipment you happen to have to hand. The result will not be identical, and it need not try to be. It will simply be your own version, shaped by your own resources and your own taste.

This is broadly the philosophy behind such an approach. It need not be positioned as a replacement for Production's Best Friend, nor should it try to be. Similar tools built to solve a similar problem will, quite naturally, arrive at different answers, and that variety is a reasonable and healthy thing in a niche as specific as Final Cut Pro reporting. A tool of this kind simply represents one such answer, offered in the hope that it, and the open framework beneath it, might be useful to others in turn.

**In light of these considerations, could a tool built on open foundations become a more natural part of how the editorial community shapes its own workflow software?**