Video playback for Feature Film (FCP 3)

Hello All, I will be editing a DV feature on Final Cut Pro 3, and doing the sound design on Pro Tools LE with an MBox hooked up to a G4 PowerMac. Will a video card like the new Aurora Fuse handle a good-sized video playback and let me cut accurately to picture in ProTools? I don't want to have to go out and get a deck and a SMPTE slave driver, and using a small Quicktime video in ProTools is out of the question. How can I handle accurate, full-screen digital video playback and keep it in sync with my ProTools timeline? Thanks.

O.k This is what i have been doing. I have never done it on anything long than a half hour, so do a test for long shows. 1. In final cut pro export an omf of the audio. 2. Export a Quicktime movie with no audio. Make it full screen, DV codec. 3. Use omf tool to convert omf into protools session. 4. Open that session and import the quicktime movie. Everything should now be in sync. 5. Turn off the movie track on your timeline. What i usually do is put the Movie window on my second computer monitor, and make sure that your Movie is on a seperate drive than your audio. 6. When finished with your mix, export a stereo aiff from protools @ 16bit 48Khz. 7. Bring this track back into Final Cut Pro and lay it back to the timeline. Turn off all your old audio tracks and BOOM you got it. Although this method works without a 2 pop i still always do one for safeties sake.Yeah and also never trust those meters in Final Cut Pro. They suck and are not right. hope that helps Gaffer

Gaffer, Thanks so much for the response. The only thing that's really confounding me about this is the size of the quicktimes. I can't even conceptualize a 90-min. QT movie, at any screen size. I don't know if the computer can even acknowledge a quicktime over 2GB. So will I have to make a bunch of 3 min. clips and put them end-to-end in the Pro Tools timeline? And will the video card handle the video playback, leaving the rest of the computer to operate the Pro Tools timeline?

Qt movies on a mac have no size limit. I have digitized hour long tapes with no problems.Well over the 2 GB's. @ GB file limit is on a pc. You should have no problem with long movies. Just drive space. The computer will handle playback of this movie fine, At least my G4 400 does.

Sounds good. Thanks again, Gaffer. I guess I'll just have to run off large QT-DV clips and come back after lunch. Now......I did the OMF process like you said. And it works, but there's major drift when it opens in Pro Tools Free. Some tracks are up to 8 seconds late! This ever happen to anyone? What is causing the problem? Edit: plus, the OMF tool asks for PT 3 or 4 as output. Am I using the wrong OMF tool?