FCE Viewer freezing

Hi Everybody.

I have been searching far and wide to find a solution to this but I haven't been able to find anything to handle it! If you have any idea's please let me know.

I've installed Final Cut Express and approached it cautiously as I'm very new to editing... I bought it before I even tried iMovie because I wanted to get into it with a jumpstart. I have a Macbook 2ghz Core Duo, 2gb of Crucial Ram (DDR2-667), a Fujitsu 150GB hard drive, and obviously an onboard graphics card. I'm running Leopard as well.

The problem I am running in to is that whenever I try to view a clip through the viewer, it will play a split second of the clip and then freeze the video, but the audio will continue playing. What makes it weirder is that it started off doing that and I was getting so frustrated and thinking I was doing something wrong and then it "fixed itself" one day for awhile and worked fine and then it went back to the way it was. This leads me to believe that it's probably a setting or I'm asking the computer to do too much?? Since I do most of editing with .avi files, it's possible that the files are too big and my friend told me that it converts them to a more "friendly format" in the background, and to convert a 4gb .avi file... would take an hour or two minimum I would imagine.

I can view the picture totally fine when I'm using the timeline and render everything properly etc. etc., no problems. But I would like to utilize the viewer like it is meant to! It will save me time and annoyance.

Also lastly, when I pause the viewer clip again, it snaps to the current frame of where it "should have" shown. So it skips everything in between until I pause and then it shows the last frame that should have been shown as I paused it...

Thank you for your help! I really have found the enjoyment of using FCE and I want to continue!

-Robert

 

Please! I need some help. I don't want to have to render the image on the timeline everytime I need to look at the picture... I need the viewer to work!