[Beewee]

I am making a video in FinalCut 3 and just recently the video playback got REALLY slow. Its choppy and looks like its skipping frames. I don't get any errors or anything. And the problem started just last night. Restarting hasn't helped and I have thrown away all of the render files and re-rendered the video as well as changing the screen resolution.

My computer is a

867MHz G4 Quicksilver
384 RAM
OS 10.2.5
Radeon 9000 Pro Card
17" Apple LCD (1280x1024)

Any help would be
appreciated thanks.

[cdrgonzo20]

just some guesses, i think this happened to me once a long time ago and there was an obvious solution, unfortunately i've forgotten it. First, make sure you didn't accidently change the canvas? (the one in the upper right corner) to 100%. If you do that the comptuer automatically renders full quality on the fly and tries to play the video as fast as it can ( usually no more than a few frames per second). Second, check all of your external video settings and make certain its not displaying externally while you're viewing it on the canvas. Also check the sequence settings and make sure the format is the proper format (DV for DV etc...). i'll try to think of some other things...

[Lordx_]

Ever since 1.0 I've always had problems with FCP dropping frames when it was playing back video on an NTSC monitor and in the canvas window at the same time. You can disable this in the Audio/Video settings window in the application menu.

However, since I have been only running OS X and FCP 3.0 for only a few weeks on 10.2, I haven't really seen any drop frame issues, also keep in mind that I was running FCP 1, 2, and 3.0 on a 400mhz G4 with 384mb of ram on OS 9.2 (I'm now on a dual 1.42ghz)

Just a thought, but I doubt this might be the problem. You can try turning off the "Put hard disk to sleep whenever possible" in the Energy preference pane.