Choices for exporting from FCP

[msf]

Hi and thanks...

If you wanted to save a FCP project as something, in case you wanted to mess with it sometime in the future (forget about the assets them selves please)....and I want to delete all the render, scratch, capture, thumbnail, auto save, etc for that project....

What file should I export to?
.DV FILE...? Would that be the "HIGHEST COMMON DENOMINATOR'?

Is that better than a QuickTime .mov file?

What is the difference between a .mov file made from:
File, Export, QT Movie
And
File, Export Using QUICKTIME Compression, QuickTime Movie?

If the answer is exporting to DV is a good choice...is it supposed to take forever to render the audio if/when I pull it back in to FCP? Why do QT's come in so quick and .dvs take a long, long time...is that part of the cost of using the "highest quality"?

Bottom line: to archive projects/movies/ whatever (lets say 5 minutes of my kid playing soccer), and to keep it in a format other than a FCP project (cuz I need the space and want o delete stuff), what is the best export method, that allows me to grab that five minutes (oh say. a year from now) and make a "best of" DVD (or whatever) using that clip and (as an example) 20 others?

Boy I take along time to write simple questions...sorry...sometimes it takes me an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes (joke, ha-ha)...anyway thanks for your patience...

Mark

[terryj]

In archiving, what I do is backup the "Capture" folder where
the media was inputed, either onto a DVD ( if it was all short clips),
or onto a FW HD ( if the whole project's media was more than say
2 hours). The files here are in DV/DVCPRO, wrapped in a
Quicktime Container, so they are your highest quality files.

FCP/FCE is based on Quicktime architecture, that is why Quicktime
files come in the fastest. Exporting the files out to the DV Stream
format changes the file to a DV Stream file, and FCP has to
re-render either the audio or the video, sometimes both, to
native Quicktime upon import to handle it.
( this is discussed in the FCP manual)


as for what is the difference between File -->Export--> QT movie
( which is a Quicktime reference file of your Sequence,
that contains all your edits up to this point), and File--> Export
using Quicktime Compression-->Quicktime Movie,
( which is asking FCP/FCE to generate a self contained Quicktime
movie, of your edits in the Sequence, using codecs you have
pre-selected in Quicktime to compress the sequence down
to your end result [MPEG-2, .mov, .mp4, etc.]), well that's
in the Manual also....