Grr! Now I know where you live Drew...we sorta...I don't think anyone really knows where you live!
What Drew said is true...for once

This is what I shared with Eric. Great to see the photo guys having video issues...and learning how bad the interfaces we have to deal with! The workflow is easy to add reel data. There was a version of FCP 5 that had a bug that would not store the modified Reel data after closing but that was fixed in a later version.
Additional thoughts on transcoding...for the most part I avoid it. You fill up your hard-drive for little gain. Both FCP and Color are 4:4:4 editing environments. Based on my discussion with the Apple senior developers at NAB, there is little reason to transcode. All effects and transitions are applied in relation to your timeline setting. "IF" you have the processing power, taking your source footage into a ProRes timeline is equivalent to converting source to ProRes and working with it in FCP. Basically, it uses the same engine to transcode as it does to render a timeline. So, you can either process twice (transcode) or process once (source footage and timeline render in target format). Apparently that is why a non conformed format takes so long to render or play in a timeline, b/c FCP is doing the process (equivalent to transcoding) on the fly.
Talking further with the Apple senior developer (Color design team), we hashed out that if your workflow ultimately ends with Color, you are better off sticking to your source format and using Color (which does floating point processing) to ultimately code your final format.
A couple of caveats here:
-Garbage in, garbage out - Software transcoding will not improve low res footage or less robust codecs like HDV. So converting to ProRes doesn't necessarily mean better. Applying effects in a ProRes timeline does mean better.
-Hardware transcoding can make a difference - sophisticated hardware transcoders can improve your footage and create better source material for editing...better than the software processing in FCP for certain. Hardware transcoding is very expensive and most of us can't afford it.
Anyway, I am sure there areas where this approach breaks down...and perhaps H.264 from Canon could be one. I need to experiment to see if the realtime timeline processing to ProRes hangs up or not with this.
Cheers
shawn