I bought new iMac i5 Quad Core but FCP still slow and tedious

[Artmuzz]

Hi,

Last week I bought the new iMac i5 Quad Core which cost me near two grand in the full intention to use it for editing and making videos on Final Cut Pro 7. However, I am really disappointed as when I import an avi video and try to play it back after trimming I still get the same message I got with the Core2Duo telling me that video needs to be rendered Then to add insult to injury it tells me that I would need a faster processor to watch trimmed video without rendering. I would of thought with using the i5 Quad Core that it was fast enough to preview edited clips without having to render them which I find quite time consuming.

Personally I prefer iMovie as it doesn't have that problem with having to render clips like FCP does. With splashing out on a new i5 Quad Core iMac I really thought I would of seen the end off the rendering blues when previewing videos on FCP but that doesn't seem to be the case I was really looking forwarding to using FCP on my new i5 iMac as it has more functions than iMovie but editing and previewing is still a pain

Art

 

[spinnerlys]

You haven't spend enough. FCP at least needs a hexadecimal core CPU to view those .avi files (professional format) in real time.

Or you can read the manual.

It would have said something about formats and codecs it does support, .avi being a format (container) it does not support, and most likely your .avi files use some MPEG-4 codec like Divx or Xvid or maybe some other codec, you can find out which via Movist.

In other words, you need to convert those .avi files to a QuickTime (.mov) file using either the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) or DV codec, or even the ProRes codec if you feel like it.
But know, that the DV codec takes up 12GB/hour, the AIC can take up up to 40GB/hour if the footage is in HD and ProRes takes up even more space.


What I don't get, you bought a 2K machine with a 1K piece of software and haven't even bothered to read the manual.
That is the first help/documentation to look into, and it is quite extensive.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant, but the answer was there, and is on this forum more often than not. MRoogle for the win or something .

 

[bmcgonag]

While Spinnerlys may sound a bit harsh in his reply, it's true that for FCP you need a much stronger processor to edit "incompatible" formats on the fly. It's really not your processor, but the codec of the video I imagine. FCP will try to transcode (render) on the fly, but it takes a lot of RAM and a lot of processor power to do this. More native formats as mentioned in the previous post, and as listed in the FCP manual will run more smoothly. Alos if you are working from an external drive without an e-sata or firewire800 connection, you will probably have even more issues (Just FYI).

Best, and don't give up...you can use FCP fine, just convert your avi files to dv first.

 

[mymateoxy]

The problem is not your brand new iMac, the problem is you don't know how to use FCP properly.

Basically, FCP doesn't have native support for .avi file formats, which is why you are having to render everytime you put it into your timeline.

You need to convert your .avi files into another codec (I recommend ProRes). You can use the ProRes Proxy format which won't take up a lot of room and then when you have finished your edit you can reconform your vision and do a ProRes (HQ) Online for grading.