[Kstheory]

The Aurora, Aja KONA and Blackmagic cards I mentioned were three that mentioned support for RT effects in FCP. I just can’t tell whether that means anything much.

[Kstheory]

Yes, I think debe is right when it comes to DV: it’s more efficient and faster to keep DV video and audio together, especially when you know that you won’t be rendering. FCP will open the QT mov files and have immediate access to both video and audio.

However, I’m not certain whether it’s better to keep audio and video together when you know that large portions of the video side of your sequence will be replaced by render files. In that case, FCP has to open (at least) two chunky streams at once: the render files and the QT mov files that combined audio and video. If the audio were separated beforehand, then FCP would only have to open one chunky render stream and a much lighter audio stream. This should reduce the chance of dropped frames.

At least this is what I surmise is happening in theory.

[Kstheory]

One thing that helps is deciding what’s more important, helping FCP perform better or keeping things more organized for your benefit.

For example, to help FCP’s real-time playback capability, it helps to keep streams it needs to access on different DISKS (not just partitions). If you keep your video files on one disk and your audio files on another (it pays to split them when capturing), then each disk can retrieve data simultaneously.

Keeping in mind how FCP and your hard drives work should help in some organizational decisions.