It works like this: Create a ProRes 422 timeline, 1920×1080, 23.98 frames per second. Start assembling your HDV footage into it. Oops! The first time you try to do an edit, Final Cut will throw up a dialog box: "For best performance your sequence and External Video should be set to the format of the clips you are editing. Change sequence settings to match the clip settings?"

See, what Final Cut Pro is doing here is noticing that you’re trying to edit HDV footage into a ProRes 422 timeline, and double-checking that that’s what you really mean to do. Wouldn’t you rather edit HDV footage into an HDV timeline like a sane person? It’s nice of Final Cut to ask, but in this case, no, we really want to put our HDV footage into a ProRes 422 timeline. Seriously. (;If you mess with your preferences, you can tell Final Cut not to ask any more, and just let you edit whatever into whatever. I don’t do this. I like being reminded that my sequence is set up differently from my footage, just in case that’s the one time I don’t want that.)

Anyway, tell Final Cut "No thanks, I really mean to do this," and start editing. Notice something interesting: You don’t have to render anything. You can play back HDV footage on a ProRes 422 timeline without rendering. Even without turning Unlimited RT on. And it plays perfectly, at full resolution, without dropping a single frame. Hell, you can even do this on a MacBook. Not even a MacBook Pro; a plain old MacBook can pull off this trick. It can scale and distort HDV footage (;which has a native 1440×1080 frame size and a non-square pixel aspect ration) into a 1920×1080 timeline with no trouble whatsoever. It’s awesome.

So what happens when you lock picture and decide to put on your logo and credits? Same thing. You just edit them in. Final Cut doesn’t care. It’ll just play the footage back when you mash play.

But when you go to export, that’s when the magic happens. On export, Final Cut will convert your whole show to the format of your timeline. It’ll render out all those scale-and-distorts, and encode the whole show into ProRes 422, writing it out to your framestore.