[Jeff Meyer]

Two ways:
1) Just open up the project Media Manager created.

2) Open Compressor. Make a new Destination that is where your H.264 media is located. Make a folder inside the folder your source media lives. Call it H.264 or something like that. Move your original media into that folder – breaking Final Cut’s connections with that media. Return to Compressor and open the preferences. Make the default Setting Formats -> Quicktime -> ProRes422 (LT) and the default destination the destination that you created. Submit the job. When Compressor finishes open Final Cut. Because you moved the original media into a folder it will tell you media is offline. Reconnect to the transcoded media.

[Jeff Meyer]

Large photos don’t do very well in Final Cut – as you’re learning.

Scaling your images down in Photoshop is a valid suggestion. Paying attention to your DPI is not a valid suggestion. Video isn’t 72dpi, 300dpi, or any specific DPI. 720HD is 720 vertical pixels whether your TV is 7″ or 7′. The number of dots per inch changes radically with varying screen sizes. Instead you’re concerned with the width and height, in pixels. You said you’re working in HD. The frame sizes (using square pixels) are 1920×1080 and 1280×720 for 1080 and 720 HD respectively.

My preferred workflow with several photos to work with them in Motion. Motion is a lot happier with them. You can even put the photos on a Final Cut timeline, then highlight them and select “Send to Motion.” Your timing and sequence settings will automatically be correct this way. You can save your work in Motion and immediately find it in Final Cut waiting for you to render. While this works, Motion files on the timeline can cause some instability so I like to export Motion documents and drop the resulting QT movie onto the sequence, or use reconnect media on the Motion document to replace it with the QT movie.

Your error about the sequence being too large is likely due to an incorrect frame size on your sequence settings. Your frame size for HD should be one of the following:
1920×1080
1440×1080
1280×1080
1280×720
960×720
(I think I got all of them.) If it’s larger than 1920×1080 it makes perfect sense for you to be erroring out.

[Jeff Meyer]

Try adding an Additive Dissolve in addition to keyframing the glow.

[Jeff Meyer]

There’s Motion’s flare generator or Video Copilot makes “Optical Flares” for After Effects if you need some extra horsepower.

[Jeff Meyer]

Plus whatever your hourly is going to be to put the filter on your machine and apply it to the clips of course.

[Jeff Meyer]

If you have an expense to produce a video you need to build that into your cost. Pass that $30 plugin on to the director. Just tell him or her that if they want to see lomo they’re going to have to pay $30 extra.

[Jeff Meyer]

Do all of your cameras have the same properties? What’s the frame size, frame rate, and compressor for your footage (click a clip and hit butterfly+9)
What are your sequence settings? (have the timeline active and hit butterfly+0)

These should match. If these are match you should be exporting at Current Settings (fast export) and then going into Compressor to convert if required.

Also, if you are reading from one drive and writing to another it can help on an export.

[Jeff Meyer]

Perhaps you could get H.264 proxy over the web (YouSendIt, Dropbox shared folders, etc.) and use a more economical method to ship the hig-res files?

[Jeff Meyer]

If it’s the same files simply make a backup copy of your media (since you’re using your backup now), reconnect to the media on the good drive and edit.

If you have trouble getting your FCP project off of the bad drive you might check where your autosave vault is – I always keep my vault on a drive separate from the project drive.

After a drive failure I doubt that I really need to remind you, but now is the time to make another backup.

[Jeff Meyer]

I think your main problem is you’re trusting the FCP canvas. Don’t. Computer monitors and TVs use different colour spaces. What you see on a computer monitor will not be what you see on a TV.

Your options are get an interface and a colour calibrated monitor or to rent an edit suite with an interface and a colour calibrated monitor. You could also burn a BluRay or DVD and check it out in your living room with the understanding that your monitor is not a calibrated monitor.

As for burning a DVD, check out this Shane Ross’ Stock Answer #42 featuring David Roth Weiss’ Secret Quick and Dirty Way to Author a DVD here:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/ross_shane/fcp_faq3.php