constantly having to render

[Scott Bush]

I hope it is ok that I dug up this old post, but I’m having a similar issue.

Despite the fact that when I drag the first clip to the timeline, and I click YES in the box that comes up and says “your sequence settings do not match the clip, would you like to make them match” I still get a red render bar over my timeline. It only happens with certain types of files, but if the program makes the settings match automatically, why would it be asking me to render? I can’t even play them back with no effects or transitions – it instantly wants me to render.

The files are ProRes 640×480, 29.97, progressive. They are actually made from hi bitrate (50Mb/sec) Mpeg-2 files – I figured this would be a decent way to be able to edit but not lose too much quality. But it always asks me to render. If I use DV it seems to work just fine, but I’d rather stay in square pixels as the original footage is that way. Am I just using “weird” settings or is something else going on?

My system is an 8-core Mac Pro with 16GB Ram and running 10.5.5

[Thomas Culhane]

When I imported my “Making Robots with my Arduino” song as an .mp3 it didn’t matter what sequence preset I used, everything had the red bar and everything needed constant rendering. I looked at the clips Aud Rate and Aud Format in the Browser and found that the Aud Rate was 44.1 KHz, which I could select in the Sequence Settings, but that the Audio format was “32-bit Floating Point” and the Sequence settings only gave choices for 8-bit, 16-bit and 24-bit. Reasoning that this was the problem I used Audacity to export the .mp3 of my song as a .wav file that had a rate of 44.1 KHz AND 24-bit. When I imported that into the new sequence (set to those audio formats) everything worked fine. I’m still using Final Cut 5 (back from when I was a student) so maybe they’ve changed things now, but I hope this helps some other folks who are having trouble!