I would re-word your original post, “Weird Client, request help!” Just give them the project and the tapes. Let them recapture as stated above. Lose them, not worth it.
That’s good warning about what FCP can do with trash, not something I’ve ever had to deal with. I pretty much empty the trash whenever I put anything in it. I just hit shift/option/command and the delete key, GONE!
I would think if you put your media in your external drive in the first place, and can see it there, you should have no worries about emptying the trash.
Not sure what you mean by “traveling,” but if the lines are jittering or flickering you have a few things to look at. One, is your jpeg overly large? It should be around twice your frame size at 72 dpi. Next, are you moving it with the motion tab? slower is better, same with scaling, a big zoom can cause problems. Next, try adding a slight vertical or gaussian blur to it, and/or the flicker filter.
I believe the suggested exported movie should be self-contained, otherwise you may still be analyzing the whole clip.
I did this to a 15 second movie and it still took over an hour, while it was churning away I exported the clip to After Effects and stabilized it perfectly, and rendered it back out in about 10 minutes total. So much for progress.