Re: THE Basics

I'm glad you're making progress. The probable reason you need to render audio is the clips probably don't have 48 kHz audio sample rates which is required by FCP (and most pro video apps). I'm not sure you can change the audio sample rate on your Flip, but I'm pretty certain you can in Streamclip. Once the clips have 48k audio, you won't need to render them.

Dropped frames most usually relate to a slow capture scratch drive. Is your drive an external or the Macbook's internal drive? If you're using your internal drive, that's probably the problem. You should never capture to your system drive. Use an external Firewire (NOT USB) drive. The type of drive you need is related to your editing codec. For instance, a Firewire 400 is fine for DV, but wouldn't work well (or at all) with an HD codec. For that you'd need a FW800, or better still a RAID array.

As for listing your system and software specs, that's definitely not impolite. Listing them helps folks diagnose your issues a lot faster.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24" TV-Logic Monitor
ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE Enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5

Final Cut Studio 2 (up to date)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN