PLEASE HELP (Dropping Frames

Question

Alright bare with me I know nothing about the program seeing how I just downloaded it. I'm using a Canon Rebel T1i as my video camera and am currently trying to shoot a music video. The video files come in as .mov files and when I edit them in Final Cut the dropping frame window would come up every second.
After several attempts I converted the videos to Mp4g and when I played the file in FCS it actually played until I added an effect and rendered then the frames would drop again pleaseeeeeee help me.
I have a Black Macbook 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
ATAPI
but Im running FCP off of an external hard drive with 900G free
Im new to this whole professional editing and any help would be greatly appriciated

Answer 1

Ok, I think I can tell you what the problem is:
Im running FCP off of an external hard drive with 900G free
Bad Idea.  You want FCP running off your system drive because it's going to be much faster and you don't want to be both running FCP of that drive AND trying to process data.  Basically you are telling your external drive to work twice as hard and that's going to kill FCP performance.  You just won't have enough connection bandwith to push your application data AND your video data through.  You are lucky you aren't crashing the program, to be honest.
FCP should be installed and running from your internal hard drive.  Move other, less critical apps and data to your external drive.
Second, what type of external hard drive are you running?  If it's USB 2.0 it's probably not going to be fast enough.  USB 2.0 has about a 400mbps connection speed (400 million bits ber second) and firewire 400 has a similar data rate.
You want a Firewire 800 external hard drive plugged into your firewire 800 port and the drive should only be crunching video data.
Fix these two problems and it should work a LOT better, but still expect long conversion/compression times if you are running a Core 2 DUO.
One other note:  If you are connecting your camera to your firewire port and can't connect your external hard drive at the same time (like me), just dump your captured video data to a folder on your system drive, then disconnect the camera, plug in your firewire 800 drive, then copy your video files and projects to the external drive.  Yeah, it takes 2 steps and is a bit of a pain, but it should work a lot better.
Hope this helps!
Louis
Oh, a couple of other notes:  I am new to this too, but I have learned a TON over the last month.  You don't need an excessive amount of internal hard drive space to capture SDV video.  I can capture 60 minutes of SDV video and it takes up about 8GB.  Figure 16GB for a motion picture's worth of data.  This you can work with on your internal drive (make space if you have to!!!).  However, when you go to turn your project into uncompressed frames for DVD authoring your files are going to get HUGE.  Make sure your ouput directories in FCP are set to your external drive (your "originals" can stay on your system drive).  Unconpressed files can reach 50-100GB or more.  900GB is plenty if you want to do a feature length film.
However, if you are working in HDV (high def) you can expect files close to twice the size on both drives.  I am not sure if a core 2 duo can do HDV to be honest, but it's worth a shot.  I know nothing about HDV because I am working solely in SDV.
One other note that just saw:  You are doing this on a MacBook?  You really want the video card of a Macbook Pro for rendering.  You should still be able to do it, but it's going to be slow.  Snow Leopard (theoretically) should make better use of your hardware, but I can't prove that.