regarding Flash, FCP, After Effects...
 

A project I'm involved in has elements that need to be converted from QT's to Flash files. There is discussion that the files need anti-aliasing, which was previously done in After Effects. My question is: does FCP 4.5 have an anti-aliasing option (couldn't find one), and does my elderly version of AE (4.0) have this or will I have to upgrade (I know, it's not even OSX-compatible, but I never use AE so I don't want to spend the $ on it for this one project).

Thanks everyone...

Are you sure you are talking about anti-aliasing and not motion blur?
(Anti-aliasing is mostly used with computer generated images and works best
if the creating program does the AA).

I'm not sure I've ever seen AA on a video application. I could be wrong on
that however. Vegas 6 on the PC doesn't seem to have it (it does have
motion blurring and interlace flicker removal though).

The original footage is animated, so I believe this is applicable.

1- Not sure if this is what you want:
You can use a filter that just blurs "high frequency" detail (i.e. edges with high contrast).

In Vegas 6, you can use the unsharp mask with negative values under amount (-0.500 is strongest... 0 is no effect).

There's a low pass filter for Final Cut that does it... I can check who makes it. I don't think FCP has a low pass filter built-in, and I don't think the USM filter takes negative values.

2- Where is the footage/source files originating from? (read your post: you said it was animated)
Are they Flash animations? If so, you should try to do anti-aliasing in the program to begin with. I'm not sure how things work in Flash. I think everything is anti-aliased. However, when you see Flash elements in a webpage the text may or may not be anti-aliased.

Charles: then it would be best to do the anti-aliasing there. For example,
any serious 3D package has that option. I've worked a while with NewTek's
Lightwave and it has all sort of anti-alias settings.

Check out that option (and the e-mail I sent), it is by far the best route.

See this thread that is running parallel as well:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=46554

Thanks gents. The footage is coming in via Digibeta, it's full-res animation that needs to be converted to Flash and anti-aliased in the process.