Is my weedy graphics card causing problems in Soundtrack Pro?

Question

Newcomer to Soundtrack Pro here, just getting to grips with what I can tell is a very powerful application, but I have a very basic question.
I am running a relatively old G5, still with its factory standard graphics card -- nVidia GeForce FX 5200 64MB VRAM -- yet somehow I have been able to get by, first in Final Cut Express for a couple of years and more recently for the last year in Final Cut Studio.
My latest project was very ambitious, at least for me: a 13-minute short film shot in DVCPro HD, for which I upgraded to Final Cut Studio. There was a steep learning curve, but I struggled on and got by with my 64MB VRAM. Then I really hit a wall when it came to the sound mix in Soundtrack Pro. I had more than 70 tracks and it was murder, dropping frames and stuttering. I bought a new external 500 GB hard drive to mix to and that improved things a little, but it was agonizingly slow with terrible audio drop frame playback problems and has resulted in a very uneven mix.
If I finally bite the bullet and invest in a better graphics card -- the 256MB GeForce 6800 Ultra was recommended to me, but they are expensive and hard to come by -- will that help the performance in Soundtrack Pro? I am not sure if it's that, or my inexperience in laying out such lot of tracks that is causing me this log jam. It has been frustrating, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi, Jim --
Thanks again for the note above. A month later, I have finally found some time to get back to my short film, trying to improve the mix in SoundtrackPro. I've been looking forward to this, because your advice seemed like a great idea. It seems obvious to me now that I should not have tried to mix my sound with my Final Cut Pro media on one drive and my STP file on another. However, I still can't get STP to work for me. Here is what I tried:
I copied all my FCP media (186 GB) from my my (232 GB) internal drive to my 500GB external drive, where I previously mixed the sound into a (62.5 MB) STP file. I then placed all my internal drive media in a new renamed folder, so STP would not get confused and go looking for it there. When I tried to open my STP file, I spent 20 minutes guiding it to find the migrated media in its new home on my 500GB external drive. I did this three times, and each time STP crashed just before it opened.
I don't have room on my internal drive to use STP to mix my FCP media there. I only have 41.GB available, which brings me back to my original problem of severe latency and dropping frames.
My last option, it seems to me, is to forget my old STP mix completely, start over on my external drive by opening my FCP source material there and use that to create a new STP file on the external drive, doing the entire mix all over from scratch. Do you think that could work, or is there some other basic workflow issue I am overlooking?
The good news is my short film has now been accepted into its first film festival -- I sent them a screener DVD made directly from FCP through Compressor. I guess I could lower my sights and use that for festival screening in a less-than-ideal mix. But that would be a shame because I put several hundred hours into Soundtrack Pro, but the levels are all over the place because I could not control the mix.
One thing I have learned: I have newfound respect for mixing and the sound editor's craft!
Joe