Objective: I’m in the process of learning how to learn to best save the contents that rest on a Final Cut Pro 5 time sequence/timeline to an external hard drive at the best possible quality byexporting it there an .avi file. My background in video editing is 99% in PC-land to date so I need you input and sage advice here please.

In general, what factors/parameters directly affect the quality of what I would export to tape or save to a hard drive?

Please, a couple questions about exporting to .avi:

What compression settings are best for my Canon GL-2?

a) Scan Mode: Progressive or Interlaced?
b) Cinepak, DV-PAL,DV/DVCPRO-NTSC,DVCPRO-PAL,DVDPRO50-NTSC or DVDPRO50-PAL?

In general:

1) When one imports a “raw”/”.dv file” from a mini dv tape into the Mac and save it to its native format (.mov) has it lost any quality by doing do? Has it suffered loss in the transformation from .raw/dv to QT/.mov?

2) Taking the process one step further, when a .mov/QT file is subsequently converted to an .avi file (so that the movie it contains can be used with the Windows platform) has anything further been removed since it just went through another process?

Just trying to understand how best to proceed.

Thanks,
Bruce