Can anyone suggest a codec that would degrade the image as little as possible, but be more universal than the current one? These .mov files I exported won't open on Macs without FCP 6 installed.

H.264 Is the highest quality regular playback codec - requires Quicktime 7 or above but is generally the most accepted in terms of bang for buck.

HOWEVER - it won't be suitable for your client to edit etc and will take a long time to transcode.

It's always a difficulty when clients say "Just give me a Quicktime." - Forgive them, because they do not know what they speak.

A Quicktime could be almost anything, do they need uncompressed, or editable on their system, or just ready for downconvert for web, or ready for output for web.

The request "Can you just give me..." when it comes to file based formats is always a headache - the best thing you can do is try and talk it through with their client - and if they don't know exactly what they want - then you should ask them what they need it for and then repost here and people should be able help out.

Thanks for the reply. From what I know so far they will be editing the footage, apparently with FCE. Which sucks because then (afaik) they can't use my FCP 6 files, nor my QT .mov files that are HD1080p30.

And I can't give them my camera tapes because the footage was shot with an XH-A1 at 30 frames.

How come the H.264 won't be suitable for editing--because it's been compressed and therefore degraded?

DON'T DO h264. They are very compressed. It is true that HDV videos in Final Cut are .mov files. But the trick is that they are actually mpeg 2 (same codec as DVDs). The great thing about HDV is that it is HD, accept compressed so that the file sizes can be smaller. It's not compressed too much, but if you are exporting a self contained HDV timeline from Final cut it may have to compress even more!
It is a very weird concept: exporting self contained does not compress the video and is the ideal way to export.
EXCEPT in the case of HDV, where if you add transitions or happen to cut within the GOP it HAS TO recompress in those areas.
The best thing to do is export apple pro res. Although I'm not sure if people without that codec can even view those files (same problem with HDV's mpeg2 codec though.)
So for a high quality export you may want to export as "animation" codec or "uncompressed"? You'll get mammoth file sizes though.
Go to your sequence settings and you can change your render settings there to prores, animation, or uncompressed, and then export self contained current settings.
If you do export current settings note that you have to go to the RT drop down menu on the tope left of your timeline and make sure the settings are best quality or dynamic. If the quality is low there I think it effects your export.

The main difference between FCS2 and FCE is that the latter uses the Apple Intermediate codec and not HDV native codec. So I think if you export as Apple Intermediate codec (which also will generate .mov files) your client will be fine. I have used FCE (v3.5.1 at the time) myself with an XH A1 (using 1080p30) and it worked very well. I, like many others here on the forum, just dropped the 30p footage into a 1080i60 timeline... in any case that works beautifully. (I don't remember the details but the footage stays 30p).

Come to think about it, it might be that the Apple Intermediate codec might be your best choice - although very much disc-hungry. H264 is like the last option you want to take; as Aric mentioned, it's heavily compressed.

Dino