I really love what this program is doing, but I just can't get acceptable preview playback speeds in FCP 6 to justify a purchase of the full product. I'm working on the re-wrapped AVCHD format shot on the Canon HF S10, I get constant dropped frames, stuttering picture, really slow scrubbing, etc., it would take forever to edit a project like this. The files play fine in QT and VLC, but not FCP. So I'm just asking if there are any tips to increase performance in FCP to play these files.

Another thing, any reason why the re-wrapped files are extremely slow in After Effects CS5? The normal .MTS files work reasonably well, but when I re-wrap them, it takes anywhere from 5-10 seconds just to render one frame with no effects, when normally I can scrub through it fine. I know I can use proxies in AE, so it's not too big of a deal, but the less steps in my workflow the better.

Hey Brandon - Can you tell us what kind of machine you're working with?

It's a 2009 iMac with 2.93 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram.

I usually edit from my external HDD using firewire 800, I wasn't sure if that was too slow, so I transferred my clips to the mac's internal HDD and pretty much got the same results.

When you drag a file to your timeline, is final cut prompting you to adjust sequence settings? Usually if i do that, and say yes, I get pretty good playable performance in final cut. Admittedly, that's on a Mac pro, but it doesn't seem like it's maxing out the system. Im on final cut pro 6 as well.

Ill test some options and see if i can find any speedups, nothing jumps to mind.

Yep, FCP is adjusting the sequence settings accordingly.

I've also got Premiere Pro CS5 on my computer and it plays back great. Granted CS5 has native AVCHD editing, but it's at least not a computer performance issue.

Could it be the camera that I'm using?