No High Quality in FCP (4.x and 5.x)

[Erik Lindahl]

Yes, I’ve thrashed the prefs-file for FCP and the “POA Cache” file in all my different “setups and tests”.

I tried FCP 4.5 in Panther and Tiger.

I just a week ago installed a clean Tiger and Final Cut Pro Studio on the machine.

I’ve tried to playback media off two different internal IDE-drives and an external FW400 drive.

Same thing. Very strange…

[Bret Williams]

Are your sequence settings DV? Because the High, Medium, Low does not affect playback quality. Only render quality. To play out firwire at any resolution other than full DV would actually require more processing power to alter the image to a lower quality and then pump it back up to a DV stream for the camera or deck. So it seems to me that EVERYTHING in your timeline is requiring a render, and your machine IS too slow for high quality RT specs. Yes, a dual 500 is considered a 500 by FCP as far as determining your RT capabilities. An 867 is considered better.

Does your timeline have any color bars across the top. Green, orange, blue, red, etc. You shouldn’t see any color bars except on portions that require rendering.

If you render your entire timeline, do the color bars go away and does playback occur at full quality on your NTSC monitor?