[Nicole Haddock]

Sometimes with layered effects, weirdness happens on fade outs. An easy solution is to place a black slug on top of your footage at the end and keyframe it from 0 to 100 opacity for however long you want the transition to be. Hopefully that might be helpful.

[Nicole Haddock]

Tsk tsk Jason, didn’t you learn that clean installs are best at the NMC? 😉

To speed things up considerably, if you make disc images of the install discs on a drive (FCP, Adobe Suite, any other apps), the install flies. I think I did a machine with FCP, CS4, iWork, iLife, and then all the various little installs (Firefox, Cyberduck, Toast, etc) and the plugins in probably 1.5 hours versus probably 5 or so.

[Nicole Haddock]

That is a kernel panic, which is no fun to deal with. This is a nice little overview of panics – https://www.thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html

But the easiest things to check/do are
-Unmount all your external drives
-Open the mac and make sure all the cards are seated correctly
-Keep in mind one of those cards might be causing the panic, so if you have extra cards like firewire expansion cards, SATA, an AJA, etc, you might eventually have to take them out one by one and see what’s causing the error.
-Check your RAM- is it seated properly? Installed properly? Bad installation or bad RAM can do bad things to macs.

Sometimes an OS reinstall is required. Fun times!

For grins I would repair permissions and flash the PRAM.

[Nicole Haddock]

Well, it might help a bit. The settings and setup all look good. I’m officially out of ideas that involve FCP. Have you tried starting a new sequence and doing it in there? Could work, crazier things have happened.
The next route is Motion or After Effects…

[Nicole Haddock]

Alas, there is no way to close a bunch of sequences at once. They introduced that feature in 7. To avoid alot of clicking, you can click on one open sequence and hit Control-W to close it, then rinse and repeat until they’re closed.

[Nicole Haddock]

We’re entering boggling territory, thus, let us start from the beginning.

Let’s get the:
System specs
FCP specs
Footage specs
Sequence settings

And a screen grab of how terrible it looks may also be helpful.

[Nicole Haddock]

And here’s my dumb follow up question-

What does ONE clip scaled down and tossed in your timeline look like? Just popped right in, no repositioning. Good or crap?

[Nicole Haddock]

In your sequence, check the Sequence Settings/Video processing tab, and check that Motion Filtering Quality is set to Best. Also, check (I know you said it is, but I like double checking) Sequence/Render All/everything is checked for video.
What’s the Compressor setting in your Sequence settings?
In the sequence itself, check the RT tab on the upper left and make sure you’re on Safe RT, Playback Video Quality- High, Playback Frame Rate – Full.

Assuming all that is set, in your Canvas window, are you looking at it 100%? Not 99 or some other weird number (50 and 25 not being weird)?

If it looks bad in FCP still, and it looks bad on export, how exactly are you exporting your file? And once looking at it in QT, are you putting the video quality on “high quality” in the Movie Properties/video track area?

[Nicole Haddock]

Depends- what version of FCP are you operating?

[Nicole Haddock]

I answered this on another forum –
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/200/882910#882911

Make sure the positioning on the Center point is in EXACT numbers, not decimals. I would also check your render settings in the RT tab in your sequence and that you’re rendering everything fully in the timeline.