a response from Serious Magic

[Doug Bischoff]

To be clear here, there is no difficulty importing either the AVI or the QT files into Final Cut Pro.

The problem crops up when you try to apply certain tools in FCP, most notably "Remove Advanced Pulldown." Many raw AVI/QT clips from DVRack will report that there is no advanced pulldown to remove. The solution is:

A) use media manager to create a copy of the project and all its media
B) open each clip in QuickTime and do a "Save As..." to a new location & name as "self contained"

Since "B" is doing nothing more than flattening the file that drove my assumption that this was what was lacking. (This is the same problem that prevents some clips from properly "fast start-ing")

I will get some samples as soon as I can!