I just realized this should be in the DV/SD section. But here goes, anyway: I have a project with almost 200 DV reels. Most were captured in Final Cut Pro, but some were captured with a third part program called iDive. (don't ask why—I'm a shareware junky). I exported the iDive clips into FCP and noticed that they stuttered during playback. I'm on a 2.0 Intel Core Duo iMac using a 250 Gig LaCie 7200 RPM Porsche hard drive for those clips. I checked the "data rate" in Edit/Item Properties/Format/Data Rate and they are 6.9 MB/sec. instead of the usual DV rate of 3.6 MB/sec. Firstly, can I batch reconvert them? Secondly, shouldn't the drive and the iMac be able to handle 6.9 MB/sec. anyway? Whussup?

Your computer sounds like its fine. FCP is having trouble reading clips because it likes to see everything in Quicktime format.

I tried importing an .mp3 audio file into my timeline, I rendered it but the playback was not smooth. To fix this, I opened the same mp3 file into Soundtrack Pro, then saved it as a quicktime audio file. I re-imported it into the timeline and it worked like a charm.

I wouldn't use iDive unless it can capture using the quicktime format.

Hey John I think in iDive there is some option to recompress the clips that you captured try doing that using settings of Quicktime movie with the ntsc or pal
dv/dvcpro codec and aiff audio and then re-import them into final cut.