What's the best form to export video from PC for work in FCP?
 

I'm using Vegas on my PC, want to move the .avi files to FCP on a mac for editing, what format should I convert them to and what settings? What program for the PC is good to use?

fcp likes quicktime. use dv ntsf for the compression, not sure what program would do this.

Your best bet imo is to export as an uncompressed quicktime. They will be nice and big but the quality will not drop at all. Plus they will play fine on the mac. Once you get everything over, compress to the codec of choice.

I 'm in a similar situation. After editing for a few years with Premiere and Vegas on my Sony laptop I found it could only handle so much and needed an upgrade.I just bought a mac and am starting to learn the ins and outs of FCP.
I 've opened a few AVI files in FCP and get a message that the files are not optimized for FCP. Does this mean that video quality is less than if they were quicktime files?

No it just means that they don't really work with FCP without rendering. Welcome to FCP the NLE that has to render almost everything...

v6 is pretty nice in regards to that. I think that message is more about performance than rendering.

I have a 3 minute video I want to put on my site for download. I want decent looking quality and not too big. The smallest I seem to be able to get it is 54 megs using the H.264. I'm using Compressor and I want it in .mov format BTW. Any way to get it down to around 20 megs or so?

Try dragging your quality slider (inside the H.264 compression dialog) to Medium, Set automatic on keyframes and bitrate.

Hijack threads much?

What actual codec are they in?

Remember, AVI (and Quicktime for that matter) are just format wrappers. The underlying codec of the original footage - verses the underlying codec you want to convert them to - will determine the amount of transcoding (and transcoding loss) you may need to suffer.

If the original PC AVI files are just straight DV - and you want straight DV in a Quicktime wrapper for your Mac, the clips will be virtually identical except for the header info. It's a losless transfer unless you muck something up in the settings as you export or import the clips.

You won't lose ANY quality nor will you need to render anything.

Even if the PC files are based on a pretty standard underlying codec like H-264 with nothing weird on the audio encoding, they should come straight across.

If the original underlying PC files are weird (e.g. some old Flash video codec with 22khz audio.) expect the Mac to need to decode and re-encode every frame.

FWIW