py_premiere

py_premiere is a Python package for working with Adobe Premiere Pro project files (.prproj).

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About

Premiere Pro project files are gzip-compressed XML object graphs. This package parses them into an Application object containing the project, its item tree, sequences, tracks and clips. The API is very close to the ExtendScript API, with validated inputs.

Sibling project of py-aep.

Features

Supported

• Reading .prproj files: project panel tree (bins, clips, media paths), sequences, tracks, track items (timeline and source times, playback-speed aware)
• Components (effects) with parameters, static values and keyframes (materialized ones - Premiere synthesizes untouched intrinsics at runtime and stores nothing for them)
• Track transitions (name, matchName, timeline times, the cut point they cover, and the wipe controls: border width/colour, direction, reverse, anti-aliasing) - a surface the ExtendScript DOM never exposed
• Sequence and clip/project item markers (read and write: name, comments, start/end, colour index)
• Footage interpretation (alpha usage, ignore/invert alpha, field type, pixel aspect - anamorphic media included), media start timecode (start_time) and attached proxies (has_proxy, proxy_path)
• Track state: mute, lock and sync lock
• Sequence work area, in/out points and playhead position
• Retiming: playback speed, reverse, and how a retimed clip fills frames (frame sampling / blending / optical flow)
• Generated media - Black Video, colour mattes, bars and tone, transparent video, counting leaders - identified by kind rather than by an empty path
• Creating from scratch: py_premiere.new() projects, add_sequence, add_bin, import_files (BMP/PNG/JPEG/GIF/TIFF/PSD stills; WAV, AIFF, M4A, MP3, AAC and WMA audio; AVI, H.264/H.265/ProRes/DNxHR in MP4/MOV and MPEG-2 in MXF, carrying start timecode and field dominance) and placing clips with add_clip / insert_clip
• Modifying read/write attributes (names, track item times, markers) and saving with Project.save(path) (atomic, refuses to overwrite)
• Adding and removing transitions (track.add_transition), on a clip end or on a cut - clamped to the available handles exactly as Premiere does, and re-saved unchanged by it
• Byte-identical round-trip: parse then save reproduces the original file byte for byte; files the serializer cannot faithfully reproduce are refused at parse time instead of silently rewritten
• Values validated against Premiere's own ExtendScript DOM (ground-truth JSON fixtures exported from Premiere)
• Effect masks (on an effect or on the clip) and time remapping - surfaces the ExtendScript DOM never exposed
• Caption tracks: each caption's text and both its timeline and source times (sequence.caption_tracks)
• Subclips (is_subclip and the boundaries that narrow them) and Motion Graphics template clips (their Essential Graphics parameters, including the edited text)
• FCPXML export (py_premiere.export.export_fcpxml)
• CLI tools: pr-inspect (structure), pr-compare (resave-churn-aware diff), pr-visualize (parsed tree), pr-validate (ground truth)

Not supported (yet)

• Popup/menu param value decoding (exposed as raw strings; verified encodings are decoded). Arbitrary-data params decode when they hold text or a shape path
• The caption enable flags and stroke-alignment popup (their slots are decoded but the values are all 0/1/2, so nothing names them yet)
• Importing media beyond the formats listed above

XMP metadata is not a gap: Premiere writes an item's XMP packet into the media file, not into the project, so there is none in a .prproj to read.

Installation

uv (recommended)

uv add py-premiere

pip

pip install py-premiere

Getting started

import py_premiere

app = py_premiere.parse("myproject.prproj")
project = app.project

for sequence in project.sequences:
    for track in sequence.video_tracks:
        for clip in track.clips:
            print(clip.name, clip.start.seconds, clip.end.seconds)

project.sequences[0].name = "Renamed"
project.save("renamed.prproj")