Snapz Pro X and Final Cut Pro

Question

I'm screen capturing QuickTime movies of usage of a website via a web browser to include in a video production. I'm using Ambrosia's Snapz Pro X to do the video capture. I've sized the browser to 720x480 for the capture. I'm exporting the capture using the animation codec (which looks much better than a DV stream), but it comes in at 8 frames per second, which doesn't mesh with my timeline (at 29.97 fps).
Is Snapz Pro X a good solution to do this, or is there a better program to do this? If Snapz Pro X is a good choice for this, what settings should I change in the program to get the best video for use in Final Cut?

Answer 1

AFAIK Snapz records the screen activity into RAM as OS-level screen calls and then renders the file to your drive with whatever CODEC you choose when you save the clip. So the choice of CODEC won't affect the frame rate, but the size of the capture frame will.
The Animation CODEC is the best choice as it retains the full fidelity of the screen grab (no loss of quality). The main thing to remember when configuring the Animation CODEC is to set the keyframe rate to 1 (every frame is a keyframe). Final Cut does a bad job of handling key frames in the Animation CODEC when making cuts edits between keys - you'll get weird artifacts.
This makes for big files and Final Cut will want to conform the clips to 29.97 (or whatever timebase your using) so it will need to render the clips before you can edit them. Make sure your timeline is set to the same frame size, CODEC and KEY FRAME rate as the clips coming in.
Once you've done your cuts and are happy with your edit, output directly to whatever delivery CODEC your going to use: MPEG2 if DVD, Flash, H-264 etc for web. Avoid rendering to DV as the DV CODEC slaughters text and hard edged objects.
My two cents worth.
Chris