[Tony Black]

David is right. I’ve been doing quite a bit of editing with large pic files (8k by 8k max) in 4.5 and 5.0 and there is a big difference in 5.0 in how they are handled. The good news is there’s an enormous increase in the quality of large pics rendered in 5.0 (in fact, the quality of any resizing is affected). The bad news is the renders are exteremely slow. In FCP 4.5, high-rez pics rendered by default in ‘fastest’ mode which is of very low quality. That’s why they look and play better in unlimited RT. When they are rendered, however, they look like crap since, as far as I know, there is no way to change the rendering quality of stills in 4.5. In contrast, FCP 5.0 has 3 render settings that affect the quality of rendered stills – ‘fastest’, the 4.5 default, which is fast but ugly; ‘normal’ and ‘best’. You can change these setting by control clicking your sequence and selecting the Video Processing’ tab; from there select your render quality from the ‘Motion Filter Quality’ pop-up menu. I’m afraid you may still be disappointed in how your stills look in RT, but at least you can finally render them in better quality than 4.5. This issue was forcing me to consider returning to my Avid system for final output until 5.0 came out.
Tony