Hello. I have a final cut project and within that timeline I have a stop motion consisting of maybe 200 stills. Whenever the 200 images are moved or accidentally shifted when adding another clip I get the preparing video for display and it takes about 1-2 minutes to stop rendering. What is most interesting is that I am working in the dv 4:3 codec (the pics are jpgs btw) on an 8 core mac pro with 4gb of ram. I have an external g raid drive for my editing as well. First of all why is the render bar popping up, and why is it taking so long. Any tips of what I can fix. This is really annoying and would appreciate help. Thanks.

P.S it seams that the preparing for video display sign is popping up when just editing clips. This is so frustrating.

This is a really inefficient way to work, the reason is that Final Cut has to reaccess all of those 200 still images each and every time you do anything on the sequence.

If it is a stop motion then you should just export the entire stop motion sequence to a quicktime (either by using quicktime pro, or just exporting that section as a quicktime from your timeline.) that way it will be one video clip and you'll be able to edit it like every other video and work much quicker

Thanks for the tip, but the stop motion is sort of in the editing phase so should i make another sequence and drop the 200 pics in there or do something-else.

increase your still image cache in prefs to something like 25% and it should go away