Dropped Frames when editing Anything

I am a beginner with FCP and have run into a situation from the getgo. I've captured video and I've imported still clips. If I edit in anyway; cut the still clip down to 5 seconds, enlarge the video image in the canvas window and try to play it back I get a message; One or more frames were dropped during playback. If this occurs frequently try:
Turning off unlimited RT
Lowering your compression data rate
Closing open sequences
Lowering the preference for real-time audio tracks
Increase the speed of your system and/or disk drives and/or network connection

I am using an iMac with the 2 GHz Intel chip, with a 500 GB hard drive and have a high speed network connection.

I don't understand all of the items listed and am also wondering if this is some little thing I need to do and don't know about. Please help....I'm trying to learn this on my own for a job I hope to take over in a year.

- do you have the intel friendly (universal binary) version of FCP?
- you shouldnt capture to your boot drive (you need a secondary, in your case, external firewire drive)
- your network connection has nothing to do with your problem

I used to get that message a lot also - but it was mainly when I was running like 6-8 audio tracks. When I cut them down, I stopped getting that annoying reminder. Have you tried doing any of the suggested things?

I just had a chat with one of the Mac people here, told him your problem, and he said that only FCP5.1 will work with an Intel chip.... What version are you running? I had suddenly remembered that there is a problem with the new Macs and some of their normal applications - like FCP and DVDStudio Pro.

Nancella:

The two things that generally solve that problem for me are:

-Lowering the preference for real-time audio tracks:
Go into the "User Preferences" menu and set your Real Time Audio tracks to a lower number. This will mean that you will have to render audio more often, but it shouldn't give you the Dropped Frames message as often, if at all...

-Turning Off Unlimited RT:
This means going to the little button on the top left of your timeline which has RT written on it and changing it from Safe RT to Unlimited RT. Safe RT is a mode in which FCP allows you to view your edits in low res without having to render everything. It does, however, cause the dropped frame warning to come up often... If you change it to Safe this will stop happening, but you will instead have to render everything to see it. Try maybe nesting parts of your sequence that you know are pretty much done, or maybe not adding titles and more complex material until the edit is nearly finished, as this helps FCP with its workload.

Nancy - I hope it IS the Intel - I'm pretty sure that's it - how frustrating. But once you get into FCP it's fun. The message re the audio tracks from miranda is also good - I've learned a lot! This forum is great.