[Phil Kennedy]

Thanks, Richard…Your suggestions make sense and are appreciated!

I have only FCP for now (when comparing the two initially I had read user reports of crashing issues with Premiere CS5 on Macs. I’ve had similar on-going issues with Dreamweaver CS4 on my 2007 MacPro so I shied away from potential problems and chose FCP. However, getting Compressor to behave itself was a frustrating 3 day saga!)

I’ll have to read up on the Media Manager step.

[Phil Kennedy]

I’m new to video production (old to still photography & graphic design) and much of the technical discussion is still over my head (but I’m a fast & avid learner!).

I’ve been informed (in several sources) that the native h.264 footage captured by my 5DII is too compressed and unsuitable to import into FCP for editing and that it must be first converted to ProRes 422 using Compressor.

Richard…I interpret your entry as indicating that it’s OK and preferable to import the original h.264 file into FCP and then transcode the edited version to final output. Is that correct?

If not, what IS the best workflow? Most of my startup projects will be instructional videos output to DVD and web downloads, so not the highest quality…yet.