'Current Settings' export in FCP X - Prores & Uncompressed only??

There is no way you can measure the two as FCP7 does not edit AVCHD media in H.264.

Well, looks like I am corrected again.

I just grabbed some H264 footage, and dragged it into a FCP 7 sequence. It did play back and set the sequence to the h264 codec, but the audio showed red and just beeped during playback.

I cut down my 20 minute clip to about 1 minute and it did export really fast.

But this does make sense, FCP 7 is entirely quicktime based. So throw a quicktime file at it and say edit it and quicktime will piece it together as requested.

FCP 7 converts the AVCHD to ProRes on import and does it very quickly. a 12min project with very basic editing takes 2min to export. FCP X with "optimize media" ticked or un ticked takes 5min to export to "current settings".

I'm not 100% sold on whether the "fast export" is all that great in FCP7 using XDCamHD material. Recently we've had all manner of problems with x-platform usage of XDCam programs edited in FCP7. Sometimes it works, other times, it doesn't. This is speaking to the Export function with the "recompress all frames" box deselected. Compatibility is good when we recompress all frames on export, but who wants to take that extra time? All this leads me to believe there certainly was a disruption in the QT/AVFoundation ecosystem and we're on the "way back up" side of things.