Are all your clips on the external drive, and is the external drive your scratch disk? If some files are on the internal drive then it could slow things down because of fragmentation.

The files on the external are audio render files, autosave vault, capture scratch and render files. The only folder that isnt on the external is the final cut pro system support folder that is under application support. Should this be on the external as well?

Come on!!!
 

I'm at a client location on FCP.

I have a DV sequence on a Quad Core Mac with 8 Gb of memory. Scratch disk is a seperate 750Gb SATA drive, (media only). I'm trying to do a layback
(print to video) and it plays audio and a still frame to the deck. Full motion video shows up on the computer monitor. I have every setting set to DV in trhe setup, timeline, external output is set to Firewire NTSC.

Please tell me that FCP really isn't that picky and that I'm doing something wrong, because I can layback all day on my little 3 year old HP P4 Centrino with a gig of memory, and a regular old notebook drive with Avid Xpress.

I am at a complete loss and i have been editing for more than 15 years and never had this much choking!!!

Complete frustration and exhaustion,

BIG OLE EDIT: Figured it out finally. Sequence was NTSC not NTSC DV....I feel stupid, go ahead and kick me..

David