Do I need a New Computer?

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

Your basic computer is just fine.

How are you capturing?

Internal HD?

Do you use a second internal drive for capture and render (and not the drive with the OS and FCP app on it?)

[Wade Threadgill]

I capture from an HD camera over firewire to an external 500GB drive.
I have used a second internal SATA 250GB drive with no noticable diff.

[Tom Meegan]

Set RT to Unlimited RT.

Set Playback Frame Rate and Playback Video Quality to Dynamic.

Close every other app while you are in FCP.

Go to Final Cut Pro > System Settings and then to the Memory and Cache tab. Pull down your application memory to between 85 and 90%. This is a counter-intuitive move, but seems to give the OS a little more play, and makes my systems run a little smoother.

Does that help?

HDV is tough on systems because so many of the frames (14 out of 15 in most cases) are virtual (not I-Frames.) If you are mastering to DVD, you might consider editing in DV anamorphic instead of HDV. Most HDV cameras will do this down-convert as you capture, or you could do the conversion of the captured files in your computer.

Here is a nice article by Larry Jordan

https://www.uemedia.net/CPC/hdvroadshow/articles/printer_13088.shtml

Here is a tutorial on one way to do the conversion

https://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_hdvxdv.html

Here is an article from Apple on the same topic

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302965

Use Google and do some research and you will discover a work flow that will work for you.

Best of luck.

Let us know how it works out for you.

Tom

[Wade Threadgill]

Thanks for the tip,…It appears this resolved the issue. It seems as the biggest help was adjusting the memory down. I would have never guessed that in a million years!

[Tom Meegan]

You’re welcome. I’m glad it helped.

Tom