Best conversion for FCP/Air?

[Rusty]

I'll be finishing and encoding a 30:00 show for air on our local PBS station. They do all their DVD/cc on FCP and have requested the show on a harddrive for transfer.

My project is 1920x1080i.

So my question is, what's the best method to preserve colors and quality and still make an acceptable for transfer/ingestion to FCP. They get a single file, not the edit.

Uncompressed?
.mov? what flavor?

I'd swear Anton had a similar thread solved lately.
this is not my cup of tea. (yet)

[rob stowell]

I'm not certain it's possible, but my first try would be panasonic's dvcproHD flavour of .mov
It's a robust codec- 100MBs, intraframe, 422 compression, and FCP works well with it for further manipulation.
I've never worked with the 1080i flavour though- just 720p. But if you can export that, I'd expect it to work well.

[NakedEye]

Hi Rusty.... if you have the HDD space go uncompressed.....if they are going to further transcode the footage when they get it into FCP then the DVCPROHD route is just another round of compression to a lossy codec you could probably do without.

Dave.