[eldarkus]

For a little while now, I have not been able to get videos to playback in the preview window of Final Cut Pro (and now Final Cut Express) The video starts to play, then stutters/hiccups for the next 10-15 seconds.. then freezes. The audio plays fine.

Videos in the main window (from the timeline) play perfectly. The files also play fine in Quicktime.

Systems Stats: Dual 1ghz G4, 9800 Radeon (the first one released), 1.25 Ghz RAM, over 100G free space on the drive.

I have tried the following so far, with no luck

1) Ran all updates to Mac OSX, Final Cut Pro, and Graphics card
2) Deleted caches for FCP and OSX
3) Deleted Preferences for FCP
4) Backed down to older ROM on the 9800 Radeon video card
5) Reinstalled the system and created a new profile to use FCP
6) Reinstalled FCP suite (and recently installed FCE just to test it out - same issue)

If anyone has any insight as to what the issue could be, I'd really appreciate it.

[- - e r i k - -]

What sort of harddrive do you have? Have you tried playing videos from an external harddrive?

[ism]

Are your viewer and canvas windows overlapping? To check just set the window layout to standard.

Is the window zoom set to 'fit to window'?

Where did the media you are viewing come from? Not iMovie? Do you have to render the clips in the timeline to get them to play fine?

[eldarkus]

It cant be the hard drive.. FCP was workig fine about 4 months ago with the same drive. But it's a WD 200G with 8MB buffer

No windows are overlapping. I have tried setting the window to fit, and have gone as low as 25% to watch the movie in the preview window. Still get the stutter/hiccup issue

The media has come from the same place. It's footage that was pulled from a Canon GL1 in 2 ways. First, from camera to FW capture. I also have a video hard drive attached to the camera. It has the ability to capture footage directly to a DV file. Can't remember the brand name right now. Will post it later. But I ddont think thats the issue. I have tried using older footage that has worked fine before.

I do have to render the audio in the timeline, but not the video. This has always been the case

This one is really stumping me.. I cant figure out what else to do... outside of buying a new machine.

[ism]

FCP / FCE don't work well with DV stream files. It really could be the issue. Try altering the footage so it is a more friendly FCE/FCP format.

See this post in this thread on Apple Discussions: http://discussions.apple.com/message...061469#1061469

It's worth having a go to rule it out.

[eldarkus]

I'll give that a shot. I have never had any issues with captured .dv files before in FCP 4.5 and 5.0, but i'll try anything.

Editing in the timeline SUCKS!!!