Final Cut Pro -Help please

[brn2rnjk1]

My wife is doing a photo montage (with music) using FCP. All of a sudden, the program is running very slow or crashing after she puts in a transmission. It also claims we have over 2800 photos in the montage which isn't true. I don't know the program, but was wondering if there are duplicative stuff or something that is making the program slow down etc. Has anyone experienced this and have a suggestion/solution?

We have a imac (intel) with 4G chip and over 200G left on the harddrive.

 

[Boyd01]

If I had to just take a wild guess, I'd say to look at the size (pixel dimensions) of the photos you are using. What are you doing with the finished project? What will it be viewed on, computer monitor? Standard definition TV? High definition TV?

Before putting the clips into FCP, I would resize them to fit your output medium (ie: 720x480 for standard definition TV, 1920x1080 for high def, etc). If you are dropping high resolution stills from something like a 6 megapixel camera into FCP then you will be making the project much larger than it needs to be and FCP will also have to work harder to rescale all of them.

What do you mean by "transmission"? Do you mean "transition"? FCP will have to render these, and that can make it slow.