My second question for helping my actress friend put together her reel is, she brought me another file of another movie which looks much really great as long as you just play it as a stand-alone.

It's a Quick Tijme movie file 1920 x 1080, Codecs: H.264, AAC, Timecod
Color profile HD (1-1-1). Data rate 727.5 k/sec, audio 32-bit floating point

Anyway, as soon as I drop it into my Final Cut 7 timeline, the frame rate seems to be slightly askew, kind of like the old "film effect" people used to put on there 60i footage years ago to make it look 24p--even though the footage she gave me is 24p to begin with:). And strangely I have to render the audio every time.

But the real problem is the footage was a little dark and once I tried to do 3-way color correction and/or a tiny amount of glow, the footage falls apart, looks like it's a sub-480 file, highly compressed, low res, etc. Is there any way I can convert to footage to a more robust version before I take it in to Final Cut?

I would 1st try converting in MPEGStreamclip to the settings of your timeline.

Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac OS X (http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html)

Free download. It should help but I wouldn't expect miracles. You could also try the same thing in Compressor.

SOP for FCP 7 is to convert the file to Prores using compressor. The file will be much larger but editing will be a breeze.

That was really helpful Les and Jase:) The only other thing in my ignorance I never realized I needed to do (because I had always edited with material from the same format) was edit them in their own timelines first.