Not having posted for a long time, I thought a share some tips as a comeback teaser.
In various forums, people have reported problems with camera stabilization inside Final Cut Pro 7 using the plugin SmoothCam (which orginally comes from Shake, no pun intended), but not in Final Cut Pro 6. For comparison I ran some tests on both systems and came to the conclusion that FCP7’s SmoothCam does not work properly with interlaced footage no matter which codec you use. FCP6’s SmoothCam does the job with whatever kind of video.
Two more tips for Apple Color:
Always de-interlace when using Color, especially when working with Color FX. There are two ways to do this, one via the Clip Settings Tab and the other in the Color FX Tab. I haven’t compared whether they give different results but my guess is it’s not going to be that dramatic (we’re talking video ‘ere).
Last one: When migrating a Color project from Version 1.x (Final Cut Studio 2) to 1.5.x (Final Cut Studio 3) and you want to keep a copy of the old version, be careful to keep them in different folders. Thing is, when you rename the .colorproj bundle (it’s not a file, but a file package), Color will crash when opening the project (because he filenames inside the package don’t match). So you can either re-name the backup, open the current version, update & save-as the project and then re-rename the backup file, or just use different folders.