Final Cut Express-only problems! (RT,rendering etc)

[tondiman]

Hey everyone,

I finally got my macbook pro 13" after years.. love it.
I'll use it mainly for video editing and i have over 30 hours to edit. I did some stuff in iMovie and its pretty simple. Then i got Final Cut Express and it seems to give me only problems.
So far i have only brought projects from iMovie (although i can't export "raw footage, but only "projects"..?). As soon as i brought them to express i got no audio and a lot of beeping. Then windows came up saying i may have to lower my RT (or something) and i may have to render etc. I did some research and i made an attempt to render....something. I'm still not sure what part i rendered, but part of it started to work. I know that express doesnt bring audio from imovie etc. and that audio has to be in AIFF.
Another window pop-up was about playback drop-off, and how maybe, my computer isnt fast enough..?!?! (its a bran spankin new MBP 13" 2,4 ghz.....and im using an external hard disk)
So here are my questions. Please help me with your most simplified phrases.. i'm a quick learner, but im completely new to mac's and comupter "language"..

- Are these problems mainly because i'm importing from iMovie? whereas if i imported from my videocamera directly to express,id have no problems??
- If i import from my camera to express (no iMovie) will i still have to render EVERYTHING?
- Most of the music that i will add to my projects will come from itunes..does this mean i will have to render or convert ALL the songs that i will use to AIFF??
- Is my macbook pro really to slow? how to solve the "RT" or "playback dropoff"?
- Is there any way to just start editing without having to convert,change,render,drop,lower,higher fricken every single clip??

imovie was simple beacause i could get to work right away..

To sum it all up, if anyone can give me a brief layout to how to start using express, that would be great..
THANKS SO MUCH!

 

[spinnerlys]

Can you post clip and sequence settings as detailed as FCE allows you? Most importantly are the resolution, the frame rate and the codec used for video.

What about importing the captured footage right from the storing location? iMovie normally saves its captured videos in Macintosh HD / Users / YOU / Movies / iMovie / ..., but you have stored them on the external anyway, thus try it from there.

Have you read the manual of FCE about the proper setup of footage and sequences?

And yes to the AIFF question. Editing applications don't really like compressed audio, thus .aiff or .wav is needed. The video should be as uncompressed as it can get too, but for proper editing it should use either the DV or Apple Intermediate Codec, which iMovie uses too.

As I haven't used iMovie, I can't help you about the "bringing project from iMovie to FCE" part though.

Via what port (USB or Firewire) is the external HDD connected to your MacBook Pro? Have you taken a look at the raw footage and opened a clip in QuickTime Player and looked at the Movie Inspector (CMD+I) and seen what data rate is used?