I thinking about upgrading to FCP and getting the FireStore MR-HD100 for my JVC GY HD200. Whats the benefit to using Clip Wrap to re-wrap m2t files to mov instead of originally recording the files as mov in the first step? Seems like by using ClipWrap I'm adding a step.

To be honest, if you've got the capability to record right to QuickTime, there aren't any huge advantages. Are you using a Firestore or some other type of recorder? Once advantage is that DDRs often don't support every framerate/etc inside of QuickTime. The other advantage is that M2T files are far more recoverable in the case of a recording failure (power loss, dead drive).

Hope that helps
-Colin

Yes, I'll be recording directly to the Firestore MR-HD100. From what I can tell it records Quicktime at several different frame rates. Thanks.

No real benefit except that my Firestore FS4HD has on rare occasion corrupted the Quicktime file where it has never ruined the m2t file. ClipWrap is an extra step but it is the method of my choice. It's also the best method if you use DVHSCap to capture from HDV tape.

What's DVHSCap ?

It's a free application from Apple (part of the Firewire SDK) that takes the raw data coming over firewire from an HDV camera and writes it to disk as an M2T. It's useful because it doesn't complain about broken timecode or blank bits of tape - it just grabs data and writes it to disk. Since FCP can be a bit picky about such things, and scrubbing HDV isn't much fun, people sometimes like to just "dump" the tape with DVHSCap and work with the file from there on out.

See the firewire sdk here:
Hardware & Drivers Downloads - Apple Developer (http://developer.apple.com/hardwaredrivers/download/)