Trying to Go back to FCP - issues

hey guys,
so since my school has only supported PC's I've gotten used to Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 for the past couple years and I haven't touched FCP since. Now that I'm trying to transition back (and hopefully get the school to switch) I have a few issues and I'm hoping someone can help me.

1. Is it normal to take 35ish minutes to render the Blue & Green Chroma effect on 12 minutes of footage? It never took so long on my school PC to render the chroma screen effect with APP and that computer doesn't have the processing power or ram as my 2.4 ghz, 4gb iMac.

2. Is there any quick search option for effects? That helps a ton with APP when you need a specific effect without using the Favorites folder.

3. Also, when trying to render all 35ish minutes, FCP constantly freezes around 6%. Any idea whats up with that?

Am I forgetting some certain settings? Like, I said, it's been a long while, and I'm trying to readjust to how this all worked. I was expecting it to be so much faster and easier since I've been telling my students how great Macs/FCP are, heh.

 

hey thanks a lot for the response.

I did a clean install of FCP 5.0.4.
Unfortunately, my external HD is being used up by time machine so as of now I'm using my main HD as my scratch drive. I think I remember someone saying it was ideal that I used an external HD as my scratch drive. Will that help it a ton? If so, I'll try to buy another and daisy chain it to my Time Machine external.

I'm slowly getting the hang of things again. I changed the RT settings to Unlimited and lowered the RT playback to medium which has helped a bit. I'm rendering everything again and we'll see if it freezes...
Looks like it froze at 5%. (was supposed to take 20 minutes now that I cut a lot of excess footage out).

If you find any search feature, let me know because that would be grand! Another little issue I have is that with APP, you can click and drag mp3 files straight from iTunes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but with FCP you have to drag it to your desktop, use QTP to convert the file to aiff, drag the file to your project folder, THEN into FCP. That seems like too many unnecessary steps, and also duplicates the file...

 

no.

 

Hmm.. I seem to be having a log & capture issue also. When I log & capture, the preview is disabled. I see the color bars, and the only way to capture footage from my mini dv cam is to press capture now. However, when it's done capturing, it doesn't allow me to rename it, and instead automatically names it as "untitled" so then I have to manually go back and rename everything. Any idea why its working this way?
I did a search on the forums and Lethal said to keep my camera connected and to reboot the computer so I'll have to try this. But does anyone else have this issue and if so, any other way around it? I'd hate to have to reboot my comp with the camera attached each time.

This is my more troubling problem and I haven't been able to find a solution with the search. When I go to render some things I get the never ending pinwheel of death... It usually happens when I render anything that takes over several minutes. For one thing it said it would take 20 minutes to render, and it pinwheel'd about 2 minutes into it.

I have a 2.4ghz alum imac with 4 gigs of ram. I installed FCP on the main hard drive and also had to use the main HD as my scratch disk also since my external is full. I thought that may be an issue, but I don't think it would cause constant issues with rendering.

 

Thanks for that bit of info!
The external HD seems to be fixing my rendering issue. I went back to my old 80 gb firelite hd and was able to render over 25 minutes with ease. Hopefully this fixes the issue for good.

As far as capturing, it's still acting up with the "preview disabled". I tried restarting my comp with the camera still attached and turned on, but when I went to open up FCP, it wasn't reading the camera. I had to turn it on and off again, and it wasn't being read again.
So until I figure this thing out, I won't be able to even rename the clips before I capture.

But at least (I hope) I have the rendering issue worked out.
Thanks again!