Print to tape OR just play the timeline

Question

IS there any quality difference in just playing a timeline and recording it OR use the :Print to Tape" function. At times when a fully rendered timeline is olayed back it will stuter. Shold I Export the timeline as a QT stand alone and play that back to record to tape?

Answer 1

If the new timeline and QT is just referencing the clips and renders and text stuff how does it playback cleaner (no stuttering) on the new timeline?
The reason they usually do is because when you load a sequence in FCP, your machine stores all the edit information -- cuts, level adjustments, render file connections -- into RAM and, for complex sequences, this is a lot of stuff to store. During playback and Print To Video, your CPU processes that edit information from RAM. Depending on the processor load, you can get some stuttering while all this goes on. With reference movies, storing info into RAM is less stressful for your machine since it has a physical file containing the edit information which your CPU can access directly.
That said, zebulun is right, reference movies don't always playback cleaner (usually because of fragmentation of your media files and/or a render issue). In that case, exporting a self-contained movie is the way to go.
I'm hesitant to recommend this upfront because self-contained movies take so much longer to write and reference movies, in my experience, solve 95% of issues.