I have Final cut studio and shake on my mac. I have all my footage stored on a 1.5T G-Raid External Drive its HDV footage. When I edit using FCP it works fine and plays back fine with no skipping or problems, but when I am using shake, motion, and color the programs seem to run extremely slow and its really hard to work with them. Is there anyway I can make this work better and be up to speed.

USB or Firewire? How much RAM?

I have a really good harddrive it has a firewire not a USB and I dont know how much RAM I have idk how to check that.

Under the Apple Menu, About this computer should tell you.

It says Procesor- 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Memory- 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Thats the only thing I could find with RAM. Is this it?

That an iMac or a MacBook Pro or?

Noah

Its the 24 inch imac

That is in fact the RAM. 2Gb should be enough to do most work depending on how large the projects are. Do you have alot of software running in the back ground while you're working?

No not really and sometimes I even close all my other applications but it doesnt really make a difference

Run the app "Activity Monitor" from Applications > Utilities to see what your computer is doing at the time. There's pretty graphs and full process listings that can show you what is actually taking up the time on the processor/hard-drive/ram.