[Jeff Meyer]

Why Compressor? I’d suggest exporting a self-contained QT out of FCP in your working sequence settings then let Adobe Media Encoder handle the compression. It’s worlds faster than Compressor, and Encore will be happy with the files.

[Jeff Meyer]

Photoshop Lightroom has a moire brush. If it’s a small, isolated clip you could export that clip as an image sequence, deal with the images in a photo app, then bring the corrected image sequence back into your nle (probably as a video clip). LR does have batch processing with brush tools, so if it’s in the same area the entire time it wouldn’t be too bad, but being a photo application there’s no keyframing engine to change an effect over several clips.

[Jeff Meyer]

Think you’d have buyers remorse over a reliable classic 15″ with the high res screen upgrade? I understand the attraction of the Retina, but it really sounds like you don’t want to deal with any problems. You could even swap in an HDD/SSD in the optical bay and have an internal boot drive and media drive. Your battery would take a hit, but it’s an option.

So long as you aren’t using the Ray Traced renderer in After Effects I think either system will have satisfying performance. For Premiere it’s only going to get better as Adobe looks to use more of the Open CL hooks in Mac OS 10.7 and 10.8.

[Jeff Meyer]

Try opening your sequence settings and changing the “Compressor” to ProRes422. No need for HQ, ProRes422 is what you want.

[Jeff Meyer]

Shane has the big question here – what are your delivery specs. If the delivery specs are 720/60p or 1080/30i you should work in your delivery timebase. 24p converts to 60p and 30i fairly well, but you don’t want to have to take 30i down to 24p. As Dave suggested, that kind of conversion is best done clip-to-clip with a motion analysis plugin like Twistor.

People get a hard on for 24p. I understand it looks nice, but don’t forget logic when establishing your workflow. Converting from 24p works well, converting to 24p isn’t as easy going.

[Jeff Meyer]

Thank you for the correction!

[Jeff Meyer]

One of the things that is killing the pro community is the MacPro is lagging behind. Apple has announced an upgrade for pro computers coming this year and that it will be “awesome.” That’s all we’ve got. No Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, just sometime this year. Humbug.

I would hold off on a new Mac until you know what they’re doing with their pro computers. The current MacPro isn’t worth your money. The architecture is 3+ years old and lacking USB3 and Thunderbolt ports.

Your current Mac could take a Snow Leopard upgrade and still run FCS2/FCP6. The Snow Leopard disc does include the Rosetta installer, which does work with Lion, so if you got Snow Leopard then went to Lion you could still install FCS2/FCP6, but it would take some work. Google could get you there. On your hardware I would stop at Snow Leopard. Older Macs didn’t age so gracefully when Lion arrived. If you’re feeling a lot of pressure to upgrade consider installing a new hard drive for use with a new OS. You’ll want a clean install of Final Cut Studio anyway, rather than a migration from OS to OS. Using a new drive (under $100) is a great way to be sure 1) your old setup is working and 2) your legacy java and streaming applications won’t be broken.

If you’re looking for new hardware and looking to go mobile, don’t rule out the non-Retina. They share the same CPU/GPU but the RAM and hard drive can be updated after purchase on the non-Retina. There’s a high-resolution option for the 15″ non-Retina that looks pretty good (using it now) while saving several hundred dollars. Plus you get an optical drive. You will be giving up one Thunderbolt port, but you get a network port and a Firewire port in exchange.

I would also like to echo the Adobe suggestion. Don’t buy it outright right now. Creative Suite is an annual update, and CS6 landed in May. The Creative Cloud option allows you to always have the current build, so if you’re a month-to-month person there won’t be any regrets there. If you’re a buy-it-outright kind of person you might do the Creative Cloud for a month or two before buying CS7. If you want comparisons of Premiere and Final Cut Pro 7 they’re all over the internet, and as mentioned above there’s a free trial. There’s also a free FCX trial out there. I’m a happy Premiere convert.

Tough spot to be in right now. We’re waiting to update a few Macs at my shop. Rather annoying to not know what’s in the pipeline.

[Jeff Meyer]

Generation loss with ProRes HQ is minimal. Even using standard ProRes generation loss is fairly insignificant. Page 15 of the ProRes whitepaper tells us the second generation of ProRes HQ will take a small hit, but after that detail is preserved.
https://images.apple.com/support/finalcutpro/docs/Apple-ProRes-White-Paper-July-2009.pdf

Here’s my advice:
It only makes sense to keep as much detail as the camera captures.
If your source is an 8 bit (HDSLR, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM 50 or less, or HDV) ProRes 422 will keep all of the detail your camera captured. ProRes HQ is overkill for these formats.
If you’ve captured at 10 bit or higher (HDCAM tapes, AVC Intra, KiPro, RED, Alexa, etc.) working in ProRes HQ is a fantastic balance between uncompressed quality and manageable size/bitrates.

If you’re paranoid about every bit and you have the space/bandwidth to burn an uncompressed codec will preserve every bit. Do some screen tests for uncompressed verses ProRes HQ and decide if the difference is significant enough for the data payload. Use difference mattes if you want to see the impacts of the compression.

[Jeff Meyer]

Does this footage have a different compression ratio?

[Jeff Meyer]

Sounds like you’ve found the upper bounds on your computer’s decoding abilities. Are you using CBR or VBR? On a VBR encode greater differences between the target/maximum bitrates means you need more decoding horsepower.