Hey now, I've been experiencing a noticable lag when editing in Final Cut (studio 1). This hasn't happened before as I've completed a few projects n the same system with no lag.

There's a solid 3-4 second lag when I make a cut or drag a clip. It's maddening. The video plays fine and I have all settings to low res but the slowdown persisits. I'm chalking it up to a deteriorating drive but was wondering if there is a fix, besides buying a new rig.

Well what sort of footage are you editing? I recently started to edit HDV footage on my Macbook Pro and the playback seems like it's in slow-mo or as if it were missing frames. I tried to use the ProRes codec and it's still doesn't help things. I did a little research and found that my Macbook Pro just couldn't cut it.

Do you have more than one drive you can test it on? (ie - internal and external maybe?) That'd be one way to check if it was the drive or not. Final Cut Studio is just a pain sometimes. You can try trashing the preferences and see if that works. It's usually a common fix, but doesn't always work. A clean install might be a good idea too.

Hopefully someone whose experienced this directly can help you out,

Kegan

PS - You need at least 10% of your hard drive space free for Final Cut to REALLY perform correctly as well, so you might want to check that.