How to Get Smooth Playback in FCP 6?

[Colin Mcquillan]

There’s a few different ways depending on what is causing the beachball.

1) get faster drives ie: RAID If you are on a macpro tower even a 3 drive software stripe is good enough for multiple stream realtime playback of all but the higher end uncompressed formats.
2) under the RT pulldown lower the playback quality (rt pulldown-top left of the timeline)
3) under the RT pulldown lower the frame rate
4) convert your footage to a lower offline quality to edit with
5) if your drives should be fast enough to playback the material you are having trouble with, free up space on those drives because they are probably full and your material fragmented

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[Zane Barker]

Your going to need to give us MORE information about your setup.

What are the specs on your computer?
What format video are you working with?
What kind of media drive are you using an how is it conected to the computer?

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Zane Barker]

Your going to need to give us MORE information about your setup.

What are the specs on your computer?
What format video are you working with?
What kind of media drive are you using an how is it conected to the computer?

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Walter Biscardi]

[Daniel San] “How to Get Smooth Playback in FCP 6? I keep getting the beach ball of death on playback in the timeline.”

Much faster playback system than you are using. Sorry, without any system information, there’s not much to go on.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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