FCP 7 time lapse help!

Dont make the time lapse in final cut, use another program like quick time pro or some free software you find with google (I use time lapse assembler) and create the time lapse to the fps you want. Make sure the finish time lapse is in a edit friendly format like apple pro res 422 before you import it to final cut. You can use mpeg streamclip to convert all your clips that are in a bad editing format (like h.264) to apple pro res 422.

Yeah use quicktime pro and make an image sequence. I suggest putting it in 24fps because you can always speed up the footage in fcp

Put your time lapse together at full res in quicktime pro or something similar tan import your full res video into final cut. Drag your clip to the timeline then go to the motion tab in the viewer window. In the motion tab, use scale and anchor point to resize and move the video around in the canvas. In the canvas window, there are three buttons in the top middle. if you click the one on the right, you can change the selection from "image" to "image with wireframe" so you clip will have a blue outline around it which will hep show you the edges of your time-lapse outside the canvas area when you are zoomed in. When I full res time lapses with my 5dmkII, i have a 5k res file to work with so you can do lots of zooming and panning on the clip when your editing in a 720p timeline.

Thanks guys, I seem to have figured it out by now, I just wasn't using the keyframes correctly. While we're here, does anyone know why my footage is reeeally choppy in playback? It was a video that I imported into quicktime, then FCP and it seems It may have dropped frames? but when I export it using quicktime the footage looks OK, anyone know what's up?

Threads. I wanna come back and read after I wake up in the morning

Dropped frames are usually cuz your computer cant handle the footage.