Playback Problems

All of a sudden I'm having problems playing back both browser clips and sequences. I keep getting the dreaded "colorwheel" It will play a few frames then the color wheel comes on. I've tried rebooting but no luck.

FYI--I am running Final Cut Studio on a Powerbook G4 with 1.25 GB Ram with Panther OS 10 v. 10.3.9. Processor is 1.25 GH. I'm told this is adequate for running all the programs and haven't had problems until now (with the exception of Motion 2 being sluggish).

Help!

What format is the footage? Where is it stored...internal or external HD?

You missed the important number. How large is the hard drive(s) and how much room do you have left?

The Spinning Beach Ball Of Death happens when the machine can't find enough high quality drive space fast enough to do the work.

No drive on a video machine should be over 90% full.

Koz

I have 7 gigs of 74 left on internal hard drive. 90 of 260 left on external. I have also tried running the disk utility but it didn't find any problems. Any other suggestions?

Yep, your internal drive is too full. Especially if it's the system drive. Do not ever capture or render to a system drive that's your bootup disk containing your applications. Move that stuff to the external drive. If you're a normal computer user, chances are your system drive is being bombarded by internet downloads, MP3 converted in iTunes, and other daily "lifestyle" files that slowly dwindle your system drive until it starts to go haywire.

Hi derekmok & others,

I have been trying to clear space on my hard drive and can't find any files that are large. I don't have any media that I can tell stored on the hard drive. I have a lot of applications including the entire FCP studio but there is no way that could be eating up 67 gigs, right?

I have a few other questions, also:

1) Is there any way to do a search to see what's taking up all the space?


2) I'm running on Panther OS X 10.39. Is is really imperative to upgrade to Tiger to optimally run FCP?

3) I have a Lacie external drive and have been reading that this is not a FCP favorite. Plus since it was formatted when I got it, I never reformatted it to Mac FHS. So far I have done two projects with no incident.

And, I accidentally bumped the drive and am wondering if that could be part of the playback problem?

I have two big jobs do by the end of the week and need to resolve problem quickly. Any advice anyone could offer will be greatly appreciated. I'm going to start with trying to make more space on the hard drive.

Thanks

>I have a lot of applications including the entire FCP studio but there is no way that could be eating up 67 gigs, right?

If you have all the meda for the tutorials, motion media, live type media and apple loops for soundtrack pro on your drive, i think that takes up about 45gb. So with that and your OS and any other apps you have that would put you up around where you are in terms of capacity. Try copying all the FCP studio media to the external drive.