Re: exporting to FCP?

Heh -- no worries on the precise thing. :-)

So you used AE to render an HDV clip which you then dropped into FCP?

Try importing the "bad" AE clip and a "good" clip back into AE and check their settings. Tell me if they match. I suspect that the AE-rendered clip may have the right frame size and rate, but not the right codec. Let us know what you get -- do the clip characteristics match exactly?

(and I didn't mean that RAM was an issue -- I meant that the hard drive might not be fast enough to play back a high-res non-HDV-compressed 1080 PAL clip)