Is there a compression setting in After Effects, that will allow you to play back that Quicktime movie in FCP 4.5 with out it being rendered in FCP 4.5?
Our Art Department uses AE to make all our Quicktime opens, closes & keyable graphics with the Photo JPEG compression setting. When I burn them to dvd & take them home to import them into my FCP 4.5,
it doesn't matter what the project setting or sequence settings are, they need to be rendered. Is it my settings? AE settings? or that's just FCP 4.5 & render them.

(These same graphics with alpha's play back fine in Motion.)

(I am a PC user, but the theory should be the same for both PC
and Mac [or any system for that matter])

I think you are approaching this from the wrong direction. A system
will ALWAYS need to process/render your footage if you go from
one format/compression to another.

So the real question is what is your output? MPEG2/DVD is NOT
the same as MJPEG (what you call photo jpeg) and will need
rendering. This should ONLY happen when outputting to a format,
not when playing in FCP. There really is no way around this,
unless you can match the source and output formats/codecs.

If you are editing in DV, export from AE DV/NTSC at 29.97 fps.

If you export the composition in the same format that you are rendering, then you won't need to re-render in FCP.

There's nothing inside After Effects that will do what you want, or inside FCP for that matter.

However, there are good programs, like Automatic Duck, that will allow you to move your timeline from AE to FCP without having to render at all, keeping your work more or less intact so that you only have to render it down once.