I'm trying to capture from a Sony digital-8 camera into final cut express 2 on an iMac G5.

Everything seems to work fine until I drop a clip on the timeline (v2) above another clip on v1. Wherever the 2 clips overlap, final cut wants to render the audio.

I noticed in the browser that any clip longer than 5 or 6 minutes has an audio sample rate slightly less than 48kHz, i.e. "4799.7Hz" or something like that and those are the clips it wants to render.

I've been using this camera/computer combination for almost a year and I've never had a problem. I really don't want to have to break up a 35 min. wedding ceremony into 5 min. chunks, but that's my workaround for now.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? I would very much appreciate any help.

Sounds like it could be a mismatch in the capture settings. Have you changed anything in the audio tracks? When I adjust the pan, levels, etc. on the audio tracks I sometimes get the same thing. But it only takes a couple seconds to render on my dual G5....

Nope. I never touched the audio. It all seems to revolve around the length of the clip. I capture a 6 minute clip and get a weird number, I capture 5 minutes of the same footage and I get the proper 48kHz.

I guess my first question should be: does having slightly different sample rates require rendering? How will that rendering affect my clips? I haven't rendered any of these clips yet because I didn't think I should have to. I never had to before. Something just isn't right.

And, no, I'm not afraid to render on my iMac. It's not so bad with a Gig of RAM. And I'm not afraid to shoot a wedding with my little single-chip camera. A little embarrassed maybe, but not afraid! :-)