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The trick isn’t the back-lit screen. The trick is in the Levels. Before your final output from your laptop you’ll want to lay an adjustment layer containing “levels” on top of the whole thing. Plug in your preview monitor (s-video to a TV will work for this) and crunch the levels to match your expectations on screen. Then just out-put the thing and watch it. I would, also, always recommend watching a thing yourself on an alternate video source such as a tv, or whatever your client has, before you hand it over.

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Whether you change it to 8-bit now or have to output it to 8-bit later (you’ll have no lower choice for video output) the file size will increase.
I, too, worked in print for 3 years and while it would be cool if it were as simple as you wish it were, the alternative isn’t really that bad.
You make a script in Photoshop to convert the 1-bit to 8-bit and select all white and delete it (if there’s any white) [play with the script when you record it on your first file]and save as tif (or PNG) with Alpha. Then run the script on the folder. You may want to reduce the file size (literally dimensions) to a more video manageable size, just little bigger than HD or whatever; but you probably already knew most of this.

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Also if you take those textures and live trace them in Illustrator to your desires detail, it can create all sorts of fun (and, somehow, clean) dirt textures.

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You can also try placing a null between the bottom layer and the footage layer. This sometimes works as a trick to separate adjustment layer effects.

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What do you plan on using the export for? There are different optimals for different uses. However, one thing that seems to remain constant is the idea of using CBR instead of VBR for anything under 75min. It’s also shorter render time.

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Nifty effects usually take forever. Have fun roto-scoping non-keyed people from a background. If you can keep your cuts short you’ll save your brain from imploding.

If you can do it in AE then, by all means, do so. Pushing around a mask is by-far the easier of two options he offered above.

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Fotos are really more of a pain than you might expect. I suggest you plan your layout, moves, and sequence before doing anything in the computer itself. Take the time to pre-vis your stuff and save the hassle of these crashes. When you’ve got the pre-vis worked out, then cut/crop/resize all your fotos-to-be-used in Photoshop before importing them into PP2. It’ll also shorten your work-flow time allotment to know what you want to do before you get the chance to be distracted by what you “could” do in PP.

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In PP2 the interpolation gets fusked up in extremely slow frame (speed) rates. I would recommend doing the effect in Aftereffects instead of Premier to give yourself more lee-way in regards to the frame blending.

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did they get back with you on this?

Try exporting to tif files and doing the final output from After Effects. Also you may want to check out Huffyuv codec. I think theres a freeware one floating around the net that’s pretty good for this stuff.

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The problem I run across in doing this is that:
(A) the video gets cropped for some reason, leaving me without the extra footage for re-sizing (it’s bizarre).
(B) when I re-opened the original project, the video files played with corrupted picture.
(C) I could only correct the corruption by importing the project into a new HDV project and opening it from there.

Now I’m back to the beginning. I have 2T of space to work with at the moment so if I need to output the whole thing to tifs and resize from that, I can. It’s just a huge pain in the… Well, you know.

I can’t wait till I can personally afford the Master (of the universe) Collection. ☺ Yay, CS3 (are we suckers for re-buying the newer and better instead of demanding free updates to the current?)