Hey, there,

I'm a Vegas Pro 8.0 user that's going to jump to Mac soon. It's no fault of Vegas, in fact, I'm really going to miss the app, but I'm not going to punish a Mac with Windows. :D (Insert campaign to get Vegas Pro 9.0 on Mac's OS here.)

My biggest concern is the 32-bit mode on FCP. With Vegas, I can throw any file type, anything, on the timeline, have it be processed in 32-bit mode, and get some sick cross fades that seriously resemble film. Just the default dissolve, being processed 32-bit.

Is that the same in FCP? Or am I going to have to re-render every piece of HDV I bring in from my FireStore to ProRes BEFORE working with it? I like working with the compressed file type because it saves space, and I can render off the original, saving me a lot of space.

Am I making sense? And if so, is any of this possible in FCP?

Just set your HDV sequence to render in ProRes. The untouched HDV footage will be left alone and you can save drive space.

That's what I surmised. Can you tell me if I can get the same results with fades in a 32-bit floating point project as I can in Vegas 8?

Your limiting factor with any edit system will be your choice of final output resolution.
Output to 8-bit 4.2.0 and thats exactly what you get.

You can force render supported effects and transitions (including the basic "Cross Dissolve") in 32 bit if you change the Sequence Settings > Video Processing to "Render all YUV material in high-precision YUV"