[Adamconover]

Actually, let me revise this question — what’s happening is, that when I put these stills in a sequence that uses default NTSC DV settings — 720×480 pixels, non-square pixels, etc — FCP doesn’t need to render the clips. However, when I set the sequence settings to the same as the stills — 640×480, square pixels, non-interlaced — it needs to render them before display. What am I doing wrong here? I’d rather not use the default DV settings because a) the final product is never going to be displayed on an NTSC device, only on a computer, so I’d rather not convert it to non-square pixels and then back again and b) whenever I move my clips in the NTSC DV sequence, Final Cut has to take a few seconds to “prepare video for display”, which slows down my editing quite a bit. Any thoughts?

[Adamconover]

What the — sorry, I have no idea how that got posted twice. (The first time I tried with an older username which I was told was deactivated.)