FCP irritates me in many ways when it comes to actual editing, but it has much better support for some formats I need to work with (HDV, RED, HD ingest for less than $7,000).

Is there a good way to offline in Avid using metacheater/metafuze and then online the final cut in Final Cut and Color?  I'm concerned mostly with picture as I will be finishing the sound in ProTools.

it is what Automatic Duck is made for.

Agreed. Auto Duck is the way to go. You will have to stay away from too much complexity in the sequence. Cuts, dissolves and motion effects to be safe. The rest you will have to rebuild.

Hey Terry, Todd -

Will Duck work with a file based workflow across the two systems?  About NAB time, I was doing an XD Cam, Avid offline, FCPHD online gig, and I asked Wes about an autoduck workflow who said it "was not quite there yet" and confirmed my hunch that I should dump everything to tape.  Went the traditionial tape based, EDL workflow from that point.  Has this changed since then for Red or any of the other file based systems?  Thanks.

You have to give each clip a tape name but, after that, it works fine.

Hope is on the horizon for you. At NAB Wes was demoing moving media files also. Supposed to be out this summer.

Is automatic duck still powerPC only? It was last time I looked.

What is the best way (strictly file based, I'm thinking RED) to high-res in FCP? I understand Avid relinking, but other than manually doing it file by file I don't know how I'd go about it in FCP.

FCP "media management", a misnomer if ever there was one, is file name driven. So name your low and hi rez files the same and have them in two different folders.

When you are ready to relink to the hi rez, "make offline" (unlink in Avid) your sequence and then reconnect it to the new folder selecting the option to connect to all files in the target folder.

If you rename any files you're screwed. Welcome to FCP. :-)

I just attempted using AutoDuck with an xdcam 35 sequence a couple days ago to online in After Effects.  It didn't want to take... but I was able to transcode the sequence to DNxHD and it was fine after that.

We us Automatic Duck for this, but with a tape-based workflow, it works reasonably well (FCP's terrible media management not withstanding). It's a bit weird about what does and doesn't make it through effects wise however - definately pays to take a good close look at the sequence in FCP to ensure that things are actually doing what you expect - even things as simple as fades to and from colour can be quirky.

With a file-based workflow I can forsee pain. Not impossible I suspect, but potentially unfun. I've found that FCP often does seem to see the filenames of imported files in sequences properly, which makes relinking them very difficult.

Codec Moment:

Is automatic duck still powerPC only?

Oh no, all plug-ins have been Universal for quite some time now.