Computer moving very, very slow - Drop frame RT Extreme warning:

Question

I am working on FC pro 5 and continually get a drop frame warning. I am getting RT EXTREME in red lettering. My sequence RT settings are at med to low. My RT layers on my time timeline are 2 to 3 at most. For the five months I've been on this project, I've had no problems like this. It suddenly came on the last work session, but today the system literally came to standstill.

Answer 1

This is all about the preview and playback experience whilst editing and does not limit the quality of anything on a final render.
Final Cut takes rendered video segments and applies certain things dynamically and does stuff like overlaying audio tracks (and adjusting all of their volumes) on the fly whilst you are previewing.
Give Final Cut more work to do and you will eventually hit some resource constraint on your system. You can either ignore this message or set some limitations on the quality that you expect during preview of this kind so that you get a smooth experience or you can turn off the warning and get noticable performance degradation.
You need to decide if you can afford stutter etc. whilst performing an edit session or if you can sacrifice some video or audio quality (that will return on export) or if you need beefier hardware. Its just a matter of choice but I agree the warning looks nasty.
-Andy