I'm running a G5 Dual 2 GHz tower with 2GB of ram. I installed a new 300 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive JUST for the video capture.

FCP seems sluggish and unresponsive. The video is choppy.

What can I do to make things run smoother?

Make sure the drive was formatted as MacOSX with journaling turned off. The default formatting turns journaling on.

However that shouldn't make FCP "sluggish and unresponsive," but it might cause dropped frames when using print to video. I'd look at some of the basics; have you upgraded to whatever the final version of FCP is? Do this on apple's site, or you should be able to do it with software update as well. Try throwing out the preference file and see if that helps.

I've done all of these things.

What else can I do?

Even the mouse gets sluggish.



Make sure the drive was formatted as MacOSX with journaling turned off. The default formatting turns journaling on.

However that shouldn't make FCP "sluggish and unresponsive," but it might cause dropped frames when using print to video. I'd look at some of the basics; have you upgraded to whatever the final version of FCP is? Do this on apple's site, or you should be able to do it with software update as well. Try throwing out the preference file and see if that helps.

What OS version and how was it installed? Did you do an upgrade or an erase/install? If you simply upgraded to Tiger, that could be the problem. It evidently leaves old versions of some files lying around which slow things down. If possible, use a large firewire drive to clone your startup drive - or use your second internal drive if you don't mind erasing what's on it. Then reformat the startup drive and do a full install of Tiger.

When it asks if you want to copy files from another machine, browse to find the cloned drive. I found this worked very smoothly for me with almost no problems. Alternately, to play it safe you could manually re-install all your software and only migrate user files. In my case, I thought it would be easier to fix any application glitches than re-install everything from scratch, and it went without incident.

Anyway, this may be the easiest way to be sure that everything is the way it should be on your system. However, there may still be issues with FCP 4.5 under Tiger. Initially it had major problems but Apple issued a few patches to address the problems.

This goes beyond your question, but you might use this as a window of opportunity to upgrade the the universal FCP studio. Your copy of FCP 4.5 entitles you to the current version of the full production suite for $200: http://www.apple.com/universal/crossgrade/. FCP 5 show improved realtime performance and is definitely worthwhile.