Hi Hal,
slowly but surely you are making progress!
Ok, first, with regards to video...now that you are using FCP7 there is absolutely no reason why you should be using 29.97 any longer. You need to re-encode at 23.976 and make sure to use the prores codec - I suggest using prores 422 LT as it saves space over 422 and is visually equivalent to 422 for the purposes of fan editing. (E.g., since the original source material will always have been encoded at least once, you really gain no benefit going with 422 at this point)
second, in order to get 5.1 audio out of MPEGStreamclip, you need to export the audio separately from the video. MPEGStreamClip can only output at most two channels at a time. so, what you need to do is, on the main screen of MPEGStreamClip, select the audio channel drop down and you should see a bunch of choices. The ones you care about are (doing this from memory so they might not be exact): L/R, Center, LFE, and Ls/Rs. You need to select each of those channels one at a time, and choose "export audio" for each one. For the two stereo channels, make sure to select stereo in the popup. For the mono tracks, select mono. For all of them, select 48k. Then export as AIFF. You can then import those directly to FCP, or, if you have a tool like QuickTime Pro (this is what I use) combine them with the video file first.
When you lay down the audio tracks (either in FCP or QuickTime Pro), the order is important, for final export. They should be in the following order: L,R,C,LFE,Ls,Rs. When it comes to exporting to QuickTime at the end for further post processing, this is the track order QuickTime expects for 5.1. I learned this the hard way when working on my fist edit, and had to remap the channels inside FCP7 for export (which you CAN do, but it's a big pain to do so).
There might be another way to get the 5.1 tracks into FCP7 - perhaps [MENTION=8664]L8wrtr[/MENTION] might have a better suggestion, since I think he still uses FCP7 and this probably knows it better than I do t this point. But the Above is what I do (even for FCPX)
As for using my edit as a source, feel free to do so, I think most editors here are fine with sharing their work and other ideas with other editors. You should know that I am nearing release of a HD version of my edit (which will also contain high quality versions of two deleted scenes, care of [MENTION=16446]emanswfan[/MENTION]
). When it is released (should be in the next month or so) you are free to use that as well (it isn't a one to one mapping though, as the length is now 82 minutes instead of 90).