Hey everyone,

Editing on a 2 year old MacBookPro in FCP 6 (Final Studio 2). The footage was shot on a Canon 5d Mark ii, and compressed to h.264 at 29.97.

When I play the clips in Quicktime, it's smooth and fine.

When I play them in the Final Cut Viewer, it's chop city!

However, when they are dragged/dropped onto the sequence and played in the Canvas, there is zero choppiness.

What on Earth am I dealing with here?

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

h.264 is not a good codec for editing with - you are much better of transcoding the footage to prores or some other format to have a smooth editing workflow (while staying HD)

Well, unfortunately I think I have to work with what I have. Still, I don't understand why it plays well in the canvas and not the viewer.

You missed the point, Kareem. H.264 is *not* an editing format and FCP doesn't play well with it natively. It will be choppy, period, there's no getting around that in H.264 in FCP.

If you look on the forum category specific to the Canon DSLR's you'll find the preferred workflow is to transcode all footage into ProRes for editing, then output whatever format you need for your finals.

There's a ton of info specific to Canon/FCP workflows in that category and would suggest giving it a look-over for the wealth of insight it will give you.

Try changing the size of the viewer window, 100% often gives the CPUs less work to do, or 50% perhaps.

Robert was right on. Converting the footage worked perfectly. Thanks!