[willed]

I'm editing together a load of short video clips I took on holiday with my Canon IXUS 100IS - a compact point-and-shoot that records video in 720p at 30fps. However, FCE4 always needs to render when I drag clips into the timeline - even when I select the Apple 720p30 codec for the project. Given that the camera even apparently encodes its video in Apple's beloved H.264 format, why am I sitting here waiting for the first 2 minute clip to render??

[mduell]

H.264 is difficult (from a technical perspective) to edit due to the use of predicted frames. Final Cut requires you to convert it to an intra only format like DV, Apple Intermediate, or ProRes 422. There isn't much quality loss if the conversion is done well. When you're done you'll want to convert back to H.264 for a decent file size since the intra only formats are quite large.

[willed]

Excellent answer - thanks!