Rendering suddenly required for cross dissolves

Hello FCP friends! First post, long-time lurker. I've been using FCS 2.0 for about 6 months now on a G5 Dual 2.0ghz with 3gb ram. My last two projects have been a breeze, but something is amiss with my latest project. I now have to render cross dissolves in the timeline before I can see them in playback. I know my machine is getting long in the tooth (the new Mac Pro is but a tax refund away!), and there are plenty of things I do which I expect require rendering, but until now cross dissolves always worked in real-time. The project was configured with an Easy Setup DV NTSC 48kHz Anamorphic - and that's the current sequence preset as well as the capture preset. I re-checked my source and they are all DV/DVCPRO NTSC. I thought maybe somehow my source was a slightly different format than the sequence, but everything jives (or so I think). I'm stumped... BTW each cross dissolve is taking about 45 seconds to render, and it's killing my productivity.

Any ideas or advice would be greatly appreciated.

*smacking forehead* Well, despite my Audio/Video settings showing the Sequence Preset as DV NTSC, I read another post of a similar nature and it prompted me to hit Apple + 0 on my actual sequence. It was setup for HD. I changed it to DV NTSC with Anamorphic and cross dissolves are real-time again. I was tempted to simply delete this thread but I'm leaving it up and exposing my temporary lapse into ignorance in hopes it gets somebody else out of a jam someday.

I won't spend too many brain cycles figuring out how this sequence in a DV project "magically" got set to HD, but it is peculiar.

> I won't spend too many brain cycles figuring out how this sequence in a DV project "magically"
> got set to HD, but it is peculiar.

You picked up a great lesson -- in troubleshooting, you have to check even the elements that you are 99 per cent sure are correct. Rule them out. If you had been too stubborn to check your Sequence Settings, you would never have figured out your problem. So, nice going.

Sequence Presets only dictate what settings a newly created Sequence would carry; pre-existing ones won't be affected. My bet would be that your current Sequence had been created before you used Easy Setup or otherwise determined the Sequence Preset.


www.derekmok.com

Derek,

Thanks for the follow-up. I agree 100% with your theory on the sequence preset. I just started shooting with an XH A1 but due to performance/space constraints I have been down-converting in camera to DV on import. I must have left my last project out of whack and the sequence in HD while importing some sample HD footage a while back. Lesson learned - and thank you for the positive feedback.