How are you converting your original footage to Prores? or are you editing the footage in it's native codec and then exporting to Quicktime conversion.

I'm trying to find the quickest and best way to convert my EX1 and Sony F350 footage to Prores.
This footage is 1920 & 1440 x1080i

I will be sending footage to a client and they would like Prores, also I will be cleaning up the footage in FCP prior to export. So my question is should I import into compressor and then export to Prores or import into MPEG Stream clip and export or import into FCP and export there.

Any good work around's for this?
Oh also: 422 or 422 HQ

For some reason I have noticed using Compressor to convert to Prores has introduced noise in the blacks but this could have been user error

I'm on a Mac with FCP7 and also FCP6 on another machine.

I just use Compressor for this. With XDCam footage, there's no real benefit to using ProRes HQ. That's really intended more for 2k (Red, Arri, etc) or 10 bit sources. But if your client requests HQ, there's no harm in giving it to them.