Couple of beginner Final Cut Express questions
 

So FCE arrived today at work and I installed it and had a bit of a play. Two things struck me that I couldn't find answers to in the manual.


1) Why can't I get realtime playback? I imported a downloaded clip (Quicktime, Sorenson codec). The Preview window played fine. I marked in out and dropped on timeline. When trying to playback was told it was unrendered. Why? It played realtime in the preview window. Couldn't find a setting or anything that'd change it and from what the manual said, it should be able to do it.

2) I also dropped an effect on one clip in the timeline, and again it said to render. OK, I'll live with that for now cause it's having rendering problems anyway, but even after render no effect showed up at all in the Canvas window - just the original clip.

So anyone have any ideas?

Cheers
Aaron

I guess someone with a newer version of FCP or FCE will have to answer. However under FCP 3 realtime only works in the canvas window, and not via external video (eg: firewire).

try dropping your video quality playback down to medium quality.....this could be a ram issue.....what is your setup?

Because Sorenson Video is not DV. Anything that is not native to the sequence presets has to be rendered and if I remember correctly, Sorenson Video is not a preset option.

Thanks guys.

Boyd - it wasn't video out that was the problem, it was just the canvas window that wasn't showing effects. Just get the normal video.

Stephen - I had it set to the defaults, which was medium on the quality - Hmm, that was on the little Quality drop down on the timeline. Were you suggesting in the Sequence Preferences for the video playback? My setup is

Dual G4 1.25Ghz. 768MB RAM. Panther (Needed for FCE)

Rhett - Hmmm. OK, that would explain it, but it's a little bit of a shame. Is this the same with FCP? I'm used to Vegas on the PC where you just drop anything on the time line and it plays ;) I'm sure the Mac can play it, I mean it *is* playing it in the preview/source window, just strang that it couldn't use the same code to play it in the Canvas window without rendering.


I must say though, that with a the small play I had it's quite nice. Very different to Vegas so it will feel alien, but I quite liked it. Also you get LiveType and SoundStage as well which look pretty good from the quicky I had with them.

Cheers
Aaron