Has anyone experienced extremely sluggish performance on FCP 4 after editing a project to some extent? I'm working on a dual G4 800 with 1.5 GB of RAM at work, and every time I get part way into a project my system slows down to a point where it's virtually unusable. For example, just moving a clip in the timeline results in the "preparing for display" progress bar to show for about one minute! I've found that by reducing the viewer window to about 25% helps to a point, but after making more edits and sequences, the problem comes right back. Disabling external video doesn't help. I used to experience similar behavior in After Effects, but after restarting the application everything would run fine for about an hour before slowing down again. In FCP, the slowdown is present as soon as I open my project. I don't think it's a hardware problem, because I had the same experience using a dual 1.25 G4.

How full are your drives? How big is your project, how many scenes, clips. If you've moved media you might try relinking your media. This problem has also been associated with longer projects (but not always) clips with speed effects (but not always), more Ram always helps, shorter timelines seem to help.

If all else fails or perhaps for a quick fix delete these files:

Your Hard Disk>Users>Your User Name>Library>Preferences Folder.
Inside the Preferences folder, com.apple.FinalCutPro.plist (move to trash).
Inside the Preferences folder find the Final Cut Pro folder and delete these two files>Final Cut Pro 4 Preference file and
Final Cut Pro v POA Cache (move to trash)

Now empty your trash. Then go to Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility and repair permissions on the startup drive. If it reports a lot of files repaired run it two or three times. Restart your computer.

Check your FCP settings, some may have reset to default settings. But they were possibly corrupt and causing your troubles. If this helps please post back.

Hmm I ran into the situation. What helps:

Going from 256MB of RAM to 512MB to 756MB

Lowering the number of clips into the timeline. If you take one clip and make 9 edits, that becomes 10 clips.

Not using as much nesting. Cutting nests up slows down FCP dramatically.

FCP3.0.4/OS 10.2/DP500 Yikes G4

I've heard cutting and pasting would help. PVFD afflicts a lot of people.

Workaround: Edit in smaller chunks (use seperate sequences) and splice completed footage together using nests or reference movies.

Yes I have had the same problem, "Preparing for display", (Dual 800 G4, 768MB Ram) on a big project 90 minutes, 5 tracks of video, and LOTS of cuts on a Live concert 5 camera shoot. I figured little methods to avoid this slow down at the time such as deleting a clip instead of changing its opacity etc, according to my vague memory.

Well, I guess it's good to know the problem isn't just with my system. I'll give the suggestions a try and let you all know what happens.

Thanks a lot, you guys are a great help.

... and yes cutting and pasting instead of dragging a clip to a different position too.....