I'm editing an hour long performance shot with three 5D's. I've got them synced up in a FCP 6 multiclip sequence, but my Mac Pro is choking on the three streams, even though I converted the camera originals to Prores (not hq). I'd like to convert the originals to a lower res proxy file, probably using Mpegstreamclip, but I've got a few questions:

1) what codec would be good for this? (I've got a Mac Pro 2.66 with 9gb ram; the video files are on an external FW 800 drive)

2) I haven't done too much offline editing, and I hope to avoid a hassle with reconnecting the prores clips. I assume I right-click on the sequence, select "make offline," and then "reconnect media" and point to the proxy files? I didn't do any file-renaming...

I'm sure I'll have more questions.

I am far from expert in FCP but I have worked on some long multicam clips without major problems. A couple suggestions you might try - break the project into segments of 10 - 20 minutes so you don't have to handle a huge timeline until you get closer to the end of the edit. Load the clips onto your computer hard drive instead of an external drive. Check that you are using dynamic playback.

I'll give that a try--I'd much rather not go through the proxy process if it's not necessary. Thanks.

Hi Jim
A lot has to do with the external drive, I'm guess. I edited four HD-streams of video, coming from my Sony XDCAM-HD and that worked perfectly. But I transferred everything to a internal disk first. Moreover, if I remember correctly, I had to select 'low' for video quality and 'safe RT'. I can look it up for you exactly what the settings were, but I'm on holiday now and I don't have my notes here withe me. I'm back on sunday, so if it's still useful, I can post again then.

With a mac Pro with 9 gig,4 HD-streams and a fast disk it, should run smoothly in any case.

I've been editing a three cam shoot for which I used XDCAM HD 422 and no problems. I use a MacBook Pro 17" i5 2.53GHz SnowLeopard and all the files are on an external 7200 LaCie FW800.

The play I shot was about and hour and a half all told.

Hi,

Another thing to try is tick medium quality, and then try not monitoring all the audio tracks if you've got them on the timeline still, just click the green monitor buttons on the left so you're listening to 1 track only and FCP isn't trying to play all those as well. Worked for me on a slower iMac.

Thanks for the replies folks. Moving the drive with the project from external FW800 to inside my Mac Pro solved the problem.